Marta Welander

Dr Marta Welander is a critical border and migration scholar and activist. She led Refugee Rights Europe as its Executive Director for five years, spearheading advocacy and field research work in borderzones and camps across Europe from 2016-2021, which resulted in the publication of more than 40 research reports. Marta holds a PhD from the University of Westminster, awarded in 2021. Her thesis is an ethnographic account of the ‘border struggles’ associated with the UK-France borderzone in northern France, where a set of insidious, temporal, and corporeal technologies of bordering, referred to as the ‘politics of exhaustion,’ are constitutive of bordering processes, as well as of the ‘border’ itself. Marta moreover has a MA in Human Rights & Democratic Governance from the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights (EIUC), and an MA in International Relations from King’s College London. Prior to that, she obtained a BA (Hons) in International Relations and Arabic from the University of Westminster. Marta is currently the EU advocacy director at the International Rescue Committee and a member of the Border Criminologies advisory board.