DR MELISSA GATTER

I am Assistant Professor in Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex, where I teach about global development, aid, and migration through anticolonial and feminist lenses. My research engages with the political, technological, and temporal dimensions of humanitarianism and development in the Arabic-speaking world and in the US.

 

Currently, I am conducting research for Surveilling Sanctuary, a multi-sited ethnography of the ongoing asylum seeker ‘crisis’ in American sanctuary cities. This research confronts the everyday repercussions of a growing (inter)national political economy of surveillance tech for asylum seekers, city officials, mutual aid activists, local police, and border agents in Chicago and New York City.

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My award-winning book Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp: A Nine-to-Five Emergency (AUC Press, 2023) explores time as an overlooked avenue of power in a carceral refugee camp in Jordan through the perspectives of its residents and aid workers. Time and Power won the 2023 Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies and earned critical acclaim in top academic journals. I am currently extending this research as my Syrian interlocutors navigate the return to Syria or choose futures in Jordan, which I wrote about for The Conversation.

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I formerly worked as a development practitioner for leading aid agencies in Jordan, including Save the Children.

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Research interests: humanitarianism and development, migration and surveillance, critical camp studies, anthropology of time and the future