Dr Evgenia Iliadou

I joined the University of Surrey on August 2020 as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Politics on the Horizon 2020 project PROTECT- The Right to International Protection: A Pendulum between Globalization and Nativization? This is an EC funded collaborative research project which is conducted by a consortium of 11 partner universities in Europe, Canada, and South Africa. As a postdoctoral researcher I am involved in Work Package 4 which investigates vulnerability and the lived experiences of refugees who are immobilised in the Greek refugee camps, notably on Lesvos Island and Thessaloniki in North Greece.

I have studied Sociology (BA) and Social Anthropology (MA) in Greece with a focus on gender. I completed my PhD in Social Policy and Criminology at the Open University (UK) on the 2015 refugee crisis and border violence. My research is an interdisciplinary self-reflexive ethnographic study which focuses on the historical development of the so-called refugee crisis and the continuum of the politics of closed borders and violence in time and space. It explores the human consequences of the EU border regime upon refugees’ lives.

My main fieldwork site is the Greek Island of Lesvos where I investigated refugees’ lived experiences of social suffering, border harms and violence. I have worked for more than a decade in detention centres and refugee camps on Lesvos and the Greek mainland as an NGO practitioner. I have an extensive professional experience with survivors of torture, sexual violence, and human trafficking.