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Staff Profile

Dr Silvia Pasquetti

Senior Lecturer in Sociology

Background


Background 

Before joining Newcastle, I was a Research Associate in the Department of Sociology and a Stipendiary Junior Research Fellow (Clare Hall) at the University of Cambridge. I received my PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2017-2018 I was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Social Science) in Princeton.

I am a political sociologist and urban ethnographer working at the intersection of law and society scholarship, urban studies, and citizenship and refugee studies. My work focuses on forced displacement in comparative and global perspective and in connection to histories and structures of colonial control, militarism, and urban marginality.


Roles

Combined Honours Sociology Adviser (2016-2017)

MA Sociology Degree Programme Director (DPD) (2020-2023).


Latest Publications


Pasquetti Silvia, Jemima Repo and Hala Shoman. 2024 (In Press). Settler Colonialism and Mortal Dangers: Affective Responses to Covid-19 and the 2021 Israeli Bombings among Young Palestinians in Gaza. International Political Sociology 2024. In Press.


Pasquetti, Silvia. 2023. "Policing Palestinians: Race, Citizenship, and Indirect Rule" PoLar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review https://polarjournal.org/2023/11/08/policing-palestinians-race-citizenship-and-indirect-rule/.


Pasquetti, Silvia. 2023. Negotiating Control: Camps, Cities, and Political Life." In Fatma Müge Göçek and Gamze Evcimen (Eds). The I.B. Tauris Handbook of Sociology and the Middle East. Bloomsbury (pp. 363-382, expanded version of 2015 City article).

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/ibtauris-handbook-of-sociology-and-the-middle-east-9780755639427/


Casati, Noemi, Pasquetti, Silvia. 2022. "How Place Matters for Migrants' Socio-Legal Experiences: Local Reasoning about the Law and the Importance of Becoming a 'Moral Insider.'" Qualitative Sociology 45, 189-218. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-021-09503-1


 

Research

Research


I am a political sociologist and urban ethnographer working at the intersection of law and society scholarship, urban studies, and citizenship and refugee studies. My work focuses on forced displacement in comparative and global perspective and in connection to histories and structures of colonial control, race, militarism, and marginality.


I have conducted fieldwork and published on colonial control, forced displacement, urban militarism, emotions, and political life among Palestinians across Israel and the West Bank. This research has appeared in interdisciplinary and sociology journals, including Theory & Society, International Political Sociology, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Law & Society Review, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Qualitative Sociology, Political Power & Social Theory, International Sociology, and City. I have also published a piece titled 'Words Burn Lips" on how poor Palestinians experience the urban security state in Lydda (Lod) for Contexts. Further, I have published public sociology essays on sociology and postcoloniality, global migration and refugees in the British Journal of Sociology and on refugees and overlapping marginalities in the Italian South for The Middle East Report (MERIP).


My work sits at the intersection of four areas of research:


1. Forced displacement (and forced immobilities)

2. Configurations and distributions of colonial control (e.g. deadly militarism, over- and under-policing, and securitised humanitarianism)

3. Law, violence, and moralities of justice

4.Citizenship, urban marginality, and (legacies of) colonialism


I am currently finishing an ethnographic book on emotions and political life among impoverished Palestinians in Lydda, an Israeli city, and Palestinian refugees in Jalazun, a West Bank refugee camp whose inhabitants were displaced from Lydda and 36 villages around it during the Nakba (Catastrophe) in 1948. The book traces the different relationships of these two Palestinian populations with the Israeli security state within the broader settler colonial geography imposed on them and explores convergences and divergences in their emotions and political life. The book, titled Refugees Together and Citizens Apart: Control, Emotions, and Politics at the Palestinian Margins under contract with Oxford University Press.


My interested in forced displacement has also prompted me to conduct new ethnographic fieldwork in Italian Southern and Northern towns as part of a new ethnographic project on global displacement and local urban marginalities on both sides of the Mediterranean. The first two publications from this project can be found in The Middle East Report (2016) and Qualitative Sociology (2022, with Noemi Casati)


I am also co-editor (with Dr Romola Sanyal, LSE Geography) of a book, titled Displacement: Global Conversations on Refuge, published with Manchester University Press (June 2020). This book draws on cases from different regions of the world to undertake a critical examination of the shifting mechanisms and unequal paths underpinning the global humanitarian management of displacement.It also offers new theoretical tools for studying different structural and experiential dimensions of displacement (in camps, cities, on the move, in everyday relations with citizens, street-level bureaucrats, civil society actors, etc). Reviews of this edited book can be found in Ethnic & Racial Studies (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2022.2045030) and in the LSE Review of Books (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2022/02/23/book-review-displacement-global-conversations-on-refuge-edited-by-silvia-pasquetti-and-romola-sanyal/).


Since 2020 I have worked (with Prof Cathrine Degnen) with practioners (The West End Refugee Centre, UK, and the Centre for Migration, Asylum, and International Cooperation, Parma, Italy) on nested projects aimed to promote a rights-based approach centred on lived experience in how local authorities and charities work on issues of refugee reception. Some of this work has been funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF). For a summary of the project see:

https://www.isrf.org/fellows-projects/building-urban-refuge-in-troubled-times/


I am also working on Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Displacement starting from his fieldwork with Abdelmalek Sayad in colonial Algeria (and also incorporating Sayad's sociology of postcolonial migration). I briefly discussed this strand of my work in its connections with my ethnography of Palestinians under Israeli rule at a workshop which was held at Chicago Sociology for the first edition in English of Bourdieu's Uprooting. Here you find the recording of part of the event (unfortunately the opening talk by Loic Wacquant is not there but please check out talks by Amin Perez and George Steinmetz):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEX9pYujFXY&t=1003s


Postgraduate Supervision

I would be happy to discuss potential postgraduate supervision with any student interested in working on any of the following topics: surveillance and the security state; humanitarianism and refugees; moral economies of justice; emotions and political action; militarism, the state, and the city; urban marginality, the sociology of Palestinians, settler colonialism, law, violence, and moralities of justice, migration and global (de)coloniality.


I have successfully supervised three PhD students to completion:

Ankita Mukherjee (Newcastle University Research Excellence Academy Funding).Exploring the discriminatory practices and social support networks of the Hijra community: A qualitative study of the 'third gender' in Delhi. (co-supervised with Prof Diane Richardson)

Silvia Maritati (Newcastle University Research Excellence Academy). Asylum, Inequality, and Sense of Place in Peripheral Europe. (Co-supervised with Prof Cate Degnen)

Pilar Morena d’Alò (NUaCT). When the spiritual becomes political: colonial tensions in Argentinian ‘green wave’ feminist knowledge production. (co-supervised with Prof Diane Richardson and Dr Stephen Seely).


I am currently supervising 6 PhD students:


Hala Shoman (ESRC funded). Palestinian Women at the Intersection of Colonial and Patriarchal Violence: Societal Renegotiations of Religion and Tradition in Gaza. (writing year).

Emily Upson (ESRC funded). Affecting the Governance of Xinjiang’s Crimes Against Humanity: How to Utilise the Correlation between Global Discourses and post-2016 CCP Policy Change (writing year)

Gabriella Mwedzi (self-funded). Forgotten Women: An Intersectional Investigation into Black Christian Responses to Intimate Partner Violence in the UK. (writing year).

Stuti Pradhan (ESRC funded). Sikkimese Women’s Differentiated Citizenship: Postcoloniality, Indigeneity, and Gender in India (3rd year).

Brightman Makoni (ESRC funded) The Production and Policing on New Categories of Migrants: Zimbabwean migrant families and the UK Health and Care Worker Visa Scheme (2nd year)

Danlei Huang rural and urban migration, gender, China (1st year)


Teaching

UG Teaching

I am the module leader for SOC2085 Refugees and Displacement: Borders, Camps, and Asylum (2nd year undergraduate module) - running 24-25 (2nd semester).


MA Teaching

I teach on SOC8050 Migration, Mobilities, Inequalities.


Publications