Skip to main content

Staff Profile

Staff Profile

Dr Silvia Pasquetti

Lecturer in Sociology

Background


Background 

Before joining Newcastle in 2015, 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 2018-2019 I was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Social Science) in Princeton. I am a former Fulbright scholar.

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 coloniality, race, militarism, and urban marginality.

 

At Newcastle University I am a member of the Power, Inequalities, and Citizenship research cluster (Sociology) the Power, Space, and Politics research cluster (Geography) and the Military, War, and Security research cluster (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences).


I am currently the DPD for the MA in Sociology and Social Research and the MA in Sociology.


Latest Publications

Pasquetti, Silvia; Sanyal, Romola. (Eds) 2020. Displacement: Global Conversations on Refuge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Pasquetti, Silvia; Casati, Noemi; Sanyal, Romola. 2019. "Law and Refugee Crises. Annual Review of Law and Social Science vol. 15, October, 289-310.

Pasquetti, Silvia. 2019. "Experiences of Urban Militarism: Spatial Stigma, Ruins, and Everyday Life." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43, 5: 848-869.




 

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 coloniality, race, securitization, militarism, and marginality.

I have published on issues of coloniality, displacement, urban militarism, law, emotions, and moral-political dispositions among Palestinians across the Green Line. This research has appeared in interdisciplinary and sociology journals, including Theory & Society, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Law & Society Review, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Political Power & Social Theory, International Sociology, and City. I have also published a piece titled 'Words Burn Lips" on the urban security state in Lydda 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 research focuses on four intersecting themes:

1. Forced displacement: histories, structures, and experiences of refuge.

2. Configurations of control: distributions of surveillance, policing, militarism, and humanitarianism.

3. The relationship between law and moralities of justice.

4. Urban marginality, poverty, and social encounters across different forms of marginality


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 and Citizens: Control, Emotions, and Politics in a West Bank Refugee Camp and an Israeli "Mixed" City is under contract with Oxford University Press for the series on Global and Comparative Ethnography.

I have also conducted 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. Fieldwork will be extended to cities in Tunisia and Morocco.This project tentatively titled Injuries of Refuge: Refugees and Chains of Marginality examines old and new marginalities in the context of  (post)colonial histories of (forced) mobility, urban marginality, border formation, and refugee reception. A first publication from this project, titled Into the Emergency Maze: Injuries of Refuge in a Sicilian Town, can be found in The Middle East Report (2016).

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).

In 2021-22 I will work with a small group of colleagues (LSE Urban Geographer Romola Sanyal, Newcastle colleagues Cate Degnen and Violetta Hionidou, and EHESS PhD student Noemi Casati) and practioners (The West End Refugee Centre, UK, and the Centre for Migration, Asylum, and International Cooperation, Parma, Italy) on a project titled Building Refuge in Troubled TImes: Conversations on Justice, Place, and Personhood across Scholarship and Practice. The project is funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF).

For a summary of the project se:

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


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, law, violence, and moralities of justice, global (de)coloniality.

I am currently supervising 5 PhD students:

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 (writing stage).

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

Hala Shoman (ESRC NINE DTP Funding). Palestinian Women at the Intersection of Colonial and Patriarchal Violence: Cultural Renegotiations of Religion and Tradition in Gaza. Co-supervised with Dr Jemima Repo (Politics) and Prof Diane Richardson (Sociology) (1st year).

Emily Upson (ESRC NINE DTP Funding). Affecting the Governance of Xinjiang’s Crimes Against Humanity: How to Utilise the Correlation between Global Discourses and post-2016 CCP Policy Change. Co-supervised with Dr Joanne Smith Finley (Chinese Studies) and Prof Rhona Smith (Law) (first year).

Gabriella Mwedzi. fForgotten Women: An Intersectional Investigation into Black Christian Responses to Intimate Partner Violence in the UK. Co-supervised with Dr Geth Rees (Sociology) (1st year).


 
Teaching

UG Teaching

I am the module leader for SOC2085 Refugees and Displacement (undergraduate module, 2nd semester of 2nd year)

I teach on SOC1032 Politics & Society (undergraduate module, 2nd semester of 1st year)

MA Teaching

Migration, Mobilities, and Inequalities (2021-2022, second semester)

Publications