New Visiting Reseacher at MOBILE - Irina Fehr
Irina Fehr is a fourth-year PhD candidate at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, studying the role of criminal law in migration control at external EU borders. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on criminalization of migration and crimes committed during migration control, investigating both over- and under-criminalization as strategies to control migration. Her doctoral project is at the juncture of EU migration law and policy, criminal law, and border criminology, combining legal and social science methods including ethnography.
As part of her doctoral work, Irina conducted four months of ethnographic fieldwork in the border area of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, engaging in participant observation while volunteering, as well as conducting semi-structured interviews. She recently published two blog posts related to this, accessible here and here.
During her PhD trajectory, Irina has been a visiting fellow at Zagreb Law School in Croatia as well as Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, USA, and she has co-coordinated the ‘Migration & Borders’ Working Group of the Netherlands Network for Human Rights Research. She holds a socio-legal M.A. in European Global Studies from the University of Basel, and a B.A. in Political Science and Modern History from the University of Zurich, Switzerland.