BorderImages: Migration, Trafficking & Rescue

We ethnographically explore everyday practices with our theoretical points of departure within critical border and trafficking studies, humanitarianism, transnational feminism, and visual anthropology.

Using films, podcasts, photography, and creative writing we communicate our research to broader audiences.

Contact us for more information on our research – we welcome invitations to collaborations, talks and screen films, in addition to interview requests. Follow this site for updates from upcoming fieldwork and events.

Sine Plambech, Senior Researcher and Film Director, PhD

Sine Plambech specializes in the areas of migration, smuggling, trafficking, and the sex industry. She works and film in migrant communities, border areas, red-light districts, and along migrant routes in West Africa, Thailand, Europe’s southern border, the Mediterranean and in Denmark. In particular, she currently engages with the urgent issue of women as refugees and migrants.

Plambech heads the research project ‘Women on the Move’ which deals with women migrants in transit and arriving as undocumented migrants from and through Africa to Europe across the Mediterranean. Funded by the Open Society Foundation.

She is behind a range of documentary films on women’s migration and human trafficking https://sineplambech.com/film/. Her forthcoming book GLOBAL SEX - Seeing Human Trafficking from the Global South Global Sex takes the reader on a personal and anthropological journey across borders and behind doors in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Denmark to understand migration and human trafficking for sex work from the perspectives of the women involved. Global Sex draws on anthropological research on migration, women, sex work, and trafficking - material collected over nearly two decades. By including the voices of the women and their communities, the book offers a holistic and visionary approach to storytelling and women's migration. The book was awarded the Carlsberg Foundations Monograph Fellowship.
 

Sofie Henriksen, PhD Fellow

Sofie Henriksen’s research explores how corporations engage in the global refugee crisis and are becoming influential humanitarian actors in international refugee governance. This research focuses on tech companies, such as Google and Microsoft, as new for-profit actors in the Migration Rescue Industry at the intersection between humanitarian aid and migration management. Through ethnographic fieldwork among humanitarian NGOs and tech companies from Silicon Valley, Sofie examines how corporate tech engagement in refugee aid is practiced and how the politics of humanitarianism and migration management shift when businesses become rescuers and rescue becomes business.

Sofie Henriksen’s PhD project “Corporate-Humanitarian Aid in the Migration Crisis” (2019-2022) is hosted by DIIS and CBS and funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research.
 

Ahlam Chemlali, PhD Fellow

Ahlam Chemlali’s research examines the politics and practices of border violence in contemporary European migration politics. Ahlam explores how the externalization of European border control to North Africa produce forms of everyday violence and how this violence shapes gendered experiences of mobility. Her research project offers unique ethnographic perspectives on how West African migrant women in transit navigate the border and rescue industry while negotiating the violent terrains that characterizes the North African borderlands, with special attention to Libya and Tunisia.

Ahlam Chemlali’s PhD project “Everyday Violence in the Borderlands: Migrant Women in Transit from Africa to Europe” (2020-2023) is hosted by DIIS and funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research. Ahlam continues her scholarly engagement with the gendered aspects of irregular migration to Europe in the project 'Women on the Move' focusing on women in transit, along the African-European migration route, in Nigeria, Niger, Libya and Italy.
 

Rebecca Solovej, PhD Fellow

This PhD project researches the consequences of border violence and border control in the Mediterranean Sea for humanitarian Search and Rescue (SAR) activities. Rebecca Solovej examines the ethical, moral, political, and emotional dilemmas humanitarian rescuers experience during SAR activities in the Mediterranean Sea, and how humanitarian practices develop and change in response to border violence against migrants. Such violence includes illegal pushbacks, sexual and gender-based violence, detention, deterrence, expulsion, human rights violations, and migrant deaths. The project contributes new knowledge about how the 'humanitarian crisis' in the Mediterranean Sea is understood, experienced, and negotiated in humanitarian SAR work. The project is based on ethnographic fieldwork among humanitarian SAR organizations in Sicily and NGO work in Berlin.

The projected is affiliated with Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

Supervisor: Anja Simonsen, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

Co-Supervisor: Sine Plambech, Senior Researcher, Dansk Institut for Internationale Studier (DIIS)
 

Consuming Life after Anti-Trafficking (pdf)Anti-Trafficking Review, issue 10, 2018
Anti-Trafficking Review, issue 10, 2018
Sofie Henriksen

Mellem håbet og havet
DIIS Comment, 14. december 2020
Ahlam Chemlali

Between "Victims" and "Criminals"
Rescue, Deportation, and Everyday Violence Among Nigerian Migrants
Social Politics 2014, Volume 21, Number 3
Sine Plambech

Sex, Deportation, and Rescue
Economies of Migration among Nigerian Sex Workers
Feminist Economics, June 2017
Sine Plambech
 
The Art of the Possible
Making Films on Sex Work, Migration and Human Traffiking
Anti-Trafficking Review, October 2016
Sine Plambech

Migration on the intimate stage of marriage
The new film Heartbound documents 15 years of migration research
DIIS Longread, September 2018
Sine Plambech, Maria Brus Pedersen and Troels Jensen

Media and trafficking in human beings
DIIS report informs EU media and the Council of Europe

DIIS Researcher receives grant from Open Society Foundation
New pilot project on women's irregular migration to the EU