Hannah Gordon is a PhD Candidate at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, Melbourne Law School. Her thesis explores how stateless is perceived and defined stateless activists.
Hannah is admitted as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria and has experience working across research, policy and legal practice. She has previously worked for the University of Melbourne, regional NGO Nationality for All and Northern Community Legal Centre. She has researched and worked extensively on statelessness, international law and refugee law and has been published in the International Journal of Refugee Law and the Statelessness & Citizenship Review.
Hannah holds a JD from Melbourne Law School and BA (Gender Studies) from the University of Melbourne. In 2019 she was Awarded the Edward Walter Outhwaite Prize for International Human Rights Law. Hannah is currently employed as a Legal Academic Associate at Melbourne Law School and is a steering committee member of the Statelessness and Dignified Citizenship Coalition – Asia Pacific.
Thesis Title
What We Talk About When We talk About Statelessness
Thesis Summary
This thesis focuses directly on how statelessness is experienced by individuals across different ethnic, cultural, geographical and migratory backgrounds. It employs a Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology to ask how statelessness is defined and experienced by persons who are (or have been) statelessness and are also working to address the impacts of this status (‘activists’). By moving away from existing theories and assumptions regarding what statelessness is, how it is experienced and what the ‘problem’ of statelessness may be there is greater potential for new and diverse perspectives of the realities of statelessness to be developed.
Supervisors
- Feminist Philosophy
- Human Rights Law
- International Law
- Law and Society
- Refugee Law
- Statelessness