Julia Morris is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is a political anthropologist and migration studies scholar whose research focuses on the commodification of human mobility. Her work examines the postcolonial overlaps of resource extractive sectors centred on migrants and commodities, extending to upcoming projects on conservation strategies in frontier development.

In this interactive, brown-bag lunch seminar, Scientia Professor Jane McAdam will talk to Julia Morris about her new book, Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru, followed by questions from the audience. This book provides an extraordinary glimpse into Nauru’s offshore processing arrangement and its impact on islanders, workforces, and migrant populations. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Nauru, Australia, and Geneva, as well as the archives of the British Phosphate Commission, Julia Morris charts the country’s colonial connection to phosphate through to a new industrial sector in asylum. She explores how this extractive industry is peopled by an ever-shifting cast of refugee lawyers, social workers, clinicians, policy makers, and academics globally and how the very structures of Nauru’s colonial phosphate industry, and the legacy of the ‘phosphateer’ era, made it easy for a new human extractive sector to take root on the island.

The book also highlights the institutional fabric, discourses, and rhetoric that inform the governance of migration around the world. Morris illuminates how refugee rights activism and #RefugeesWelcome-style movements are caught up in the hardening of border enforcement operations worldwide, calling for freedom of movement that goes beyond adjudicating hierarchies of suffering.

Her book is available via this link and can be purchased with a 30% discount code (09BCARD).

Co-hosted by UNSW’s Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, the Forced Migration Research Network, and the Institute for Global Development