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Eleanor Paynter is an academic expert in migration, asylum and race in Europe. Her research centers on migrant detention, integration, and rights, as well as representation across a range of media. She focuses especially on sea crossing from North Africa to southern Europe and on migration in Italy, using ethnographic methods and media and narrative analysis to understand how changing policies and discourses affect people’s experiences on the ground. 

Eleanor’s book Emergency in Transit analyzes a range of migrant testimonies produced in Italy during Europe’s recent “refugee crisis” to challenge crisis and emergency framings of migration between the global south and global north. She has ongoing ethnographic projects on reception and detention centers in Italy, migrant farmworkers in Southern Europe, and related social and racial justice campaigns. She has written about the longer histories behind current EU policies and practices, as well as the important echoes between Mediterranean and US/Mexico border zones.

Recent Media:
Unmasking Europe’s deadly migration policy (Green European Journal, March 24, 2023)
Media deterrence campaigns: Border externalisation and neoliberal belonging (Border Criminologies University of Oxford, Nov. 6, 2023)
‘I’m not a refugee, I’m a person’: Rethinking power and community in humanitarian contexts (Routed Magazine, March 26, 2023)
A court case against migrant activists in Italy offers a reminder – not all refugees are welcome in Europe (The Conversation, May 13, 2022)
The U.K. wants to send refugees to Rwanda. That’s become a trend. (The Washington Post, April 20, 2022)
Death on the Central Mediterranean: 2013-2020 (The New Humanitarian, Jan. 12, 2021)
Children die at record speed on U.S. border while coyotes get rich (Bloomberg, Oct. 19, 2019)
Italy’s shutdown of huge migrant center feeds racist campaign to close borders (The Globe Post, July 16, 2019)
Europe’s refugee crisis explains why border walls don’t stop migration (The Conversation, Jan. 30, 2019)