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+45 6065 0479
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spl@diis.dk
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Sine Plambech

Senior Researcher
Migration and global order
Bio

Primary research areas

Sine Plambech's research focuses on international migration, human trafficking, smuggling, border politics, refugees, women's migration, sexual violence, deportations, sex work, marriage migration, documentary film, and visual anthropology. Sine Plambech conducts fieldwork in migrant and border communities in Nigeria, Thailand, Italy and Denmark.

Current research

Plambech heads the project "Women on the Move" with Open Society Foundations which engages with the contemporary ‘European migration crisis’ in relation to the urgent issue of women as refugees, migrants and trafficked. The project examines women's undocumented migration routes from West Africa to Europe, with fieldwork in Nigeria, North Africa and Sicily.

Sine Plambech is an awardwinning filmmaker and as part of her research she continously explores alternative forms of representation and research dissemination through creative writing, film and visual anthropology. In her upcoming film, she explores violence and everyday life among female migrants on Europe's Southern border.

Plambech is part of the ‘Gender, Justice and Neoliberal Transformations Research Network’ at Columbia University in New York. This transnational research team explores questions of gender and justice in the current geopolitical and economic moment. The team includes researchers working across sites ranging from New York City to Detroit, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Madrid, Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

As a Visiting Professor at Yale University's Ethnicity, Race and Migration programme Sine Plambech is working on developing new research on migration, race, gender and border control in a comparative US-EU perspective.

In her forthcoming ethnographic book, Sine Plambech takes the reader on a global journey into the world of sex in the age of migration. Drawing on over 17 years of ethnographic research the book explores the contemporary transformations of labor, feminism, border politics through the prisms of sex, gender and migration.

Previous Projects

In the project Women, Sex & Migration: Seeing Sex Work Migration and Human Trafficking from the Global South, Sine Plambech explored how sex work migration and human trafficking are practiced, perceived and have impacted two communities in Thailand's Isaan province and Nigeria’s Edo State where migration has become a familiar social phenomenon with many families having a female relative in Europe.

The project was awarded the Sapere Aude Elite Grant by the Danish Research Council.

Read more on Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond

MIGMA: Transnationalism from above and below: Migration management and how migrants manage (MIGMA) examined European attempts to return Nigerian migrants back to their home country.

Read more on University of Oslo's webpage

Managing Migration: Risks and remittances among migrant Thai women

Women from Asia are increasingly traversing borders to marry men in the Western world. This project presented ethnographic research focused on Thai women married to Danish men. The films Fra Thailand til Thy and Heartbound are based on this research.