Dr Myriam Fotou

Myriam Fotou joined the University of Leicester as Lecturer in International Relations in January 2017 shortly after completing her PhD at the London School of Economics under the supervision of Professor Kimberly Hutchings. Her thesis aimed at the creation of a distinctive ethics of hospitality, inquiring into conceptualisations of Otherness in contemporary International Political and International Relations Theory within an increasingly securitised intellectual and policy migration framework. Her current research activities are centred around mainstream understandings of key migration figures (migrant, refugee, migrant smuggler, etc.) through the lens of crimmigration, death at the border, the language used in ethics of migration and IPT and its colonial connotations along with issues of state and institutional responsibility in migration governance.  

My research sits at the intersection of political theory and migration and is fundamentally concerned with ethics of hospitality. My doctoral thesis (2016) titled “Ethics of Autoimmunitary Hospitality: Envisaging the Stranger in the Contemporary World” focused on questions of otherness and border-crossing and developed a critique of securitisation, global justice and human rights’ approaches, counterposing a poststructuralist conceptualisation of responsibility. Since then, I have published research on the political philosophy of pessimism, and the theorisation of ‘crisis’ as constitutive of identity formation, all in the context of migration. Currently, my research engages primarily with (a) the tension between ethics and politics in relation to the criminalisation of border-crossing (crimmigration), (b) the intersectional and postcolonial questioning of current migration scholarship and management policies, and (c) liminality and death.

I am currently writing on the decriminalisation of migrant smuggling while I I have been working on my first monograph, entitled “Deviant Deaths: Migrant Death at the Border”.

Beattie, A.R., Rozbicka, P. Akhtar, P., Fotou, M., Unsworth, M. (2024) Refugee Housing in Birmingham, UK: An assessment of the local experience from diverse perspectives. Report I. Birmingham, UK: Aston University

Fotou, M. (2022) Playing the refugee: aesthetics of trauma in mainstream refugeehood dramaturgy, Critical Studies on Security 10(2), 96-100.

Fotou, M. (2020), Identity and Migration: from the "refugee crisis" to a crisis of European Identity. In Amanda Machin and Nadine Meidert (Eds.) Community in Crisis? Political Identification in Europe. Emerald.

Fotou, M. (2019). The Pessimism of the Shipwreck: Theorising Migration in International Relations. In Tim Stevens and Nicholas Michelsen (Eds.), Pessimism in International Relations. Provocations, Possibilities, Politics. Palgrave MacMillan.

Fotou, M., Srnicek, N. and Arghand, E., (Eds.). (2013). Materialism and World Politics. Special Issue, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(3).  

under review:  Fotou, M. (2025) Racial and colonial aphasia in EU border security. The case of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum in Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, Special Issue on EU border Security and Racialisation.

At the undergraduate level I convene and teach the research-led PL3143 International Migration in the Age of Securitisation third year module and the PL1021 Power in the World Economy, while I contribute to PL1022 Key Concepts in International Relations. 

At the postgraduate level, I am director of the MA Human Rights and Global Ethics programme, convening and teaching the PL7089 Politics of Human Rights and the distance learning version of it PL7589 Politics of Human Rights.