Laura Cleton

Laura Cleton is a postdoctoral researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam, specializing in deportation governance in Europe. As part of the FAiR (Finding Agreement in Return) project, she investigates the perceived legitimacy of deportation among street-level bureaucrats who are involved in implementing return and readmission policy, with a specific focus on (re)documentation and identification procedures. She defended her PhD ‘Deporting Children. Policy Framing, Legitimation and Intersectional Boundary Work’ in October 2022. The project relied on feminist intersectionality theory to unravel the ways the Dutch and Belgian authorities legitimize the deportation of undocumented migrant children by centering the intertwinement of discursive "boundary work" with "bordering practices". She is Associate Editor for the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Steering Committee member of IMISCOE's SC on Gender and Sexuality in Migration Research (GenSeM) and acts as the secretary of the Dutch Association for Migration Research (DAMR).