Dr Charlotte Sanders

Charlotte Sanders is a Lecturer in Anthropology. Broadly, her research is concerned with the logics, functions and everyday effects of borders, and considers contemporary bordering practices in their relation to colonialism, racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy. In particular, Charlotte’s work is focused on the UK border regime and its ‘everyday life’; including the spatial formations which it brings into being, the spatial techniques through which it is (re)produced and maintained, and everyday geographies of resistance.

Charlotte received her PhD from the University of Exeter in 2019, for a thesis which explored Sudanese women’s everyday encounters with the state in the post-colonial city of Portsmouth. A feminist ethnography, Charlotte’s thesis aimed to broaden understandings of when and where borders operate, and how that might bring into view different domains and registers of ‘struggle’ in our understandings of how immigration governance is resisted. This research has been published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies, and is currently being prepared as a book manuscript.

After completing her PhD Charlotte was a Senior Research Associate on an ESRC/UKRI research project which gathered life-story narratives with ‘migrants’ experiencing homelessness in the UK throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Through these stories, the project explored and challenged the UK border policies and practices that (re)produce a racialised politics of precarity for migrants, cutting across the ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen’ binary. This research has been published in the Journal of Cultural Analysis & Social Change, and the Sociological Review.

Charlotte’s current research is concerned with the use of carceral architectures within UK immigration control. Charlotte is also committed to community grounded research, and is currently undertaking training to become a OISC accredited volunteer immigration adviser.

• Sanders, C. & Stewart, S. (forthcoming). ‘Enduring Borders & Precarity: Swift Falls & Stretched Time in the Lives of Migrants Experiencing Homelessness in the UK’.
• Sanders, C. & Stewart, S. (2022) ‘Cultivated Invisibility & Migrants’ Experiences of Homelessness during the COVID-19 Pandemic’. The Sociological Review.
• Sanders, C. (2020). ‘COVID-19 and the (Extra)ordinariness of Crisis: Lessons from Homeless Migrants. Journal of Cultural Analysis & Social Change. 5(2).
• Sanders, C. (2019). ‘Cartographers of Disrupted Belonging: Sudanese Mothers Drawing Maps of Portsmouth (UK)’. Journal of International Women's Studies. 20(4).

Migration and diaspora; border regimes; (im)migration, racism & governance; everyday bordering; necropolitics, slow death, and the anthropology of precarity; critical race theory; feminist theory and methods; spatial analysis, urbanisms, architectures; everyday politics; community grounded research.