18.00-19.30h, Room: 15/318

In her talk, Christina Boswell will expand on the argument developed in her most recent book, States of Ignorance. Governing Irregular Migrants in Western Europe (2023, ed. with Emile Chabal), which examines how states have actively avoided producing knowledge about irregular migrants. This work challenges the prevailing assumption that states seek to maximise surveillance and information about their populations, and offers a striking new perspective on migration governance by showing how the non-production of knowledge can itself be politically consequential for the production of migration.

Christina Boswell is an internationally renowned migration scholar, Professor of Politics at the University of Edinburgh, and founder of the Centre for Science, Knowledge and Policy. Alongside her academic work, she has held a wide range of consultancy and advisory roles on immigration and asylum issues. Her research examines how politicians and civil servants use knowledge, information, and data to understand policy problems, justify policy responses, and communicate them to the public. She analyses how expertise is deployed in political debate and how knowledge claims shape trust and accountability between governments and voters, with a particular focus on comparative immigration policy in the UK, Germany, and the EU. These themes are explored in depth in her widely acclaimed book The Political Uses of Expert Knowledge: Immigration Policy and Social Research (2009).