Research

The Wellcome Trust Humanities Research Fellowship project examines histories of 20th century medico-legal borders and puts (im)(e)migrants’ voices at its center. Drawing on historical narratives of mental, emotional, and physical disorders as produced in accounts by migrant and refugee arrivals to Britain, Egypt, and Palestine, the project analyses the varied ways in which migrants understood and negotiated infirmities and border controls. It engages with the conceptual framework of biocredibility together with a pathographical reading of precarious migrants’ historical sources. These migrants include the forcibly displaced, refugees, and labour migrants from across Asia and Africa who attempted to enter Great Britain by sea, and Palestine and Egypt overland. Focused on a period when imperial authorities accelerated the use of biopower as a tool to manage borders, including ports, the research will foreground the transnational circulation of knowledge among refugees, displaced persons, and low-waged labourers labeled as ‘medically undesirable’. I foreground ‘subaltern clinical voices,’ borrowing the methodology in part from scholars of global south post-colonial histories of psychology. In doing so, I can orient archival documents as pathographies, or auto/biographical illness narratives. Biocredibility, borrowing from medical anthropology, is an especially powerful lens through which to examine empirical data to highlight how medically-undesirable migrants constructed and conveyed ownership over their conditions and the pathology of their illnesses to engage with diagnoses, immigration controls, and orders of deportation.

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​Subverting the documentary regime is my concurrent project, began in 2015 when I was Research Associate in Palestine/Israel Studies at the University of Manchester. This is currently a manuscript project, focused on the social history of clandestine, illicit, and undocumented immigration to and from Palestine and the wider Middle East, and the consequences of this movement for the individuals, families, and communities involved in the migration process. Reliant upon the methodological approach of micronarrative, I use legal documents, petitions, court cases, attorney files, and often-desperate family letters by and about socio-economically precarious migrants largely left out of historical records not only on Palestine but the wider region. These migrants were laborers, orphans, single women, conflict-refugees, people-smugglers and the smuggled, who crossed Palestine’s colonial borders both voluntarily and involuntarily throughout the interwar years and the half-decade following the end of the Second World War. Subverting the documentary regime exclusively considers transregional and transimperial migrants not only from across the Middle East/North Africa but also Central Asia, India, and East Africa, and it insists on the need to depict the Palestine Mandate as a real, tangible, and quietly-violent apparatus experienced viscerally by transregional migrants.