Eleanor Paynter, School of Global Studies and Languages

Eleanor Paynter, Assistant Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, School of Global Languages and Studies

Eleanor Paynter

Assistant Professor
Practice Areas: Migration, Asylum, Race, Human Rights, Europe, Italy, Detention, Refugee Ethnography  

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Biography:

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.

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