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 current research activities are centred around crimmigration (the criminalisation of migration) and how it affects understandings of key migration figures (migrant, refugee, migrant smuggler, etc.), the language used in ethics of migration and international political theory and its colonial connotations. I am currently finalising an article on migrant smuggling with the title "Whose crime? The ethics and politics of migrant smuggling criminalisation" and working on grant that would allow me to further expand my research on the economy of smuggling in the Mediterranean and the impact of the anti-smuggling legal framework at national and European level. Both are to be submitted in 2022.

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.

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.