Visiting Fellowships

What is the focus of your fellowship with PMCS?

I work as a researcher at Statefree, a non-profit organisation based in Germany that aims to create visibility, community and political change around the topic of statelessness. We recently concluded a 10-month participatory research project with three very engaged and intelligent research fellows on the legal and administrative challenges stateless people face in Germany. I’m focusing my time here on reflecting and writing about all the insights and learnings from that project. This includes thinking about how an approach that centres around lived experience of statelessness can expand our understanding of what statelessness is and how it is re/produced.

What brought you to work on statelessness?

There are two answers to this question. It’s important to say that I myself have no lived experience of statelessness. I’ve been very interested in how state power manifests in our lives, which is partly rooted in my own experience of having dual citizenship. This often meant having more privileges (e.g. more voting rights and access to visas because of my German passport that my Portuguese friends didn’t have access to). But it also led to me not having access to public health insurance in Germany despite my German citizenship. Looking back, I think the employees simply didn’t know what to do because I didn’t fit into the system. Living without proper health insurance for four years was quite stressful and played a big part in orienting me towards my interest in citizenship, political subjectivity, statehood and political anthropology. But my work on statelessness only started in 2019, and that started with a friendship in Berlin. This friend was stateless, and learning about his situation made me decide to focus on statelessness for my master's thesis. This research then led me to meet Christiana Bukalo, the initiator and founder of Statefree. It has been very rewarding to accompany Statefree's journey from an idea to a growing community and impactful project.

Could you name a highlight of your work on statelessness?

There have been many over the last years! Working on statelessness often means being confronted with everything that is wrong with this world. But my work with Statefree has also allowed me to engage with incredibly intelligent and inspiring people. This was very present throughout the research project, for instance when we created the first wireframes for a digital statelessness case assistant. Another highlight was the Statefree Dinner we organised last year, where we brought together stateless individuals and members of the German parliament for a shared dinner. The conversations were intense but very honest, and challenged existing power dynamics by reframing who is in conversation with whom about necessary political and social changes.

What are your future plans for working on statelessness?

Germany still doesn’t have a dedicated statelessness determination procedure, which is part of the reason why there are still so many stateless people without a recognised stateless status in Germany. Our focus over the next years will be co-developing a digital statelessness procedure. I’m looking forward to contributing with research and will investigate how administrative officials deal with statelessness, especially looking at what keeps them from identifying statelessness so that we can address these issues more systematically.