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Staff Profile

Dr Silvia Pasquetti

Senior Lecturer in Sociology

Background


Background 

Before joining Newcastle, I was a Research Associate in the Department of Sociology and a Stipendiary Junior Research Fellow (Clare Hall) at the University of Cambridge. I received my PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2017-2018 I was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Social Science) in Princeton.

I am an interdisciplinary sociologist and urban ethnographer working at the intersection of law and society scholarship, urban studies, and citizenship and refugee studies. My work focuses on forced displacement in comparative and global perspective and in connection to histories and structures of colonial control, militarism, and urban marginality.


Roles


MA Sociology Degree Programme Director (DPD) (2020-2023).


Latest Publications


Degnen Cathrine, Pasquetti Silvia, Barnes Hannah, Marchetti Chiara, Rossi Michele. 2025. "It was Like a Tsunami": Challenges for Refugee Third-Sector Organizations at a Time of Repressive Asylum Policies. Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees, 41(1), 1-19. In Press.


Pasquetti Silvia, Jemima Repo and Hala Shoman. 2024. Settler Colonialism and Mortal Dangers: Affective Responses to Covid-19 and the 2021 Israeli Bombings among Young Palestinians in Gaza. International Political Sociology, 18, 3 https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae031.


Pasquetti, Silvia. 2023. "Policing Palestinians: Race, Citizenship, and Indirect Rule" PoLar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review https://polarjournal.org/2023/11/08/policing-palestinians-race-citizenship-and-indirect-rule/.


Pasquetti, Silvia. 2023. Negotiating Control: Camps, Cities, and Political Life." In Fatma Müge Göçek and Gamze Evcimen (Eds). The I.B. Tauris Handbook of Sociology and the Middle East. Bloomsbury (pp. 363-382, expanded version of my 2015 City article).

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/ibtauris-handbook-of-sociology-and-the-middle-east-9780755639427/




 

Research

Research


I am an interdisciplinary sociologist and urban ethnographer working at the intersection of law and society scholarship, urban studies, and citizenship and refugee studies. My work focuses on forced displacement in comparative and global perspective and in connection to histories and structures of colonial control, race, militarism, and marginality.


I have published on settler colonialism, distributed coercive control, forced displacement, urban militarism, emotions, and political life among Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and segregated poor communities in urban Israel. This research has appeared in a number of journals, including Theory & Society, International Political Sociology, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Law & Society Review, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Political Power & Social Theory, and City.


I have also published public sociology essays on citizenship, human rights, postcoloniality, and migration in the British Journal of Sociology, on refugees and "chains of marginality" in the Italian South for The Middle East Report (MERIP), and on emotions, dispossession, and urban surveillance among Palestinians in Lyd for Contexts. Further, I have co-edited two special issues on forced encampment in global and comparative perspective for International Sociology and City and published a review on refugees and scales of law and justice for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.


My work sits at the intersection of four areas of research:


1. Forced displacement (and forced immobilities)

2. Configurations and distributions of colonial control (e.g. deadly militarism, over- and under-policing, and securitised humanitarianism)

3. Law, violence, and moralities of justice

4.Citizenship, urban marginality, and (legacies of) colonialism


My first book, titled Refugees Together and Citizens Apart: Control, Emotions, and Politics at the Palestinian Margins is forthcoming (2026) with Oxford University Press. This ethnographic monograph compares how Palestinians negotiate and seek to resist Israeli coercive control in two localities of marginality: the segregated districts of Lyd (Lod), an Israeli city from which Palestinians were expelled during the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe), and the Jalazone refugee camp in the West Bank where most inhabitants are originally from the Lyd area. Bringing together the securitized policing in Lyd and the layers of militarism, humanitarianism, and PA rule in Jalazone, the book examines how coercive differentiation is experienced and contested affectively and politically. Along the way, it illuminates how the violent dismemberment of the Palestinian body politic is reproduced and reconnection pursued at the Palestinian refugee and urban margins across the Green Line.


The book also opens a dialogue between Palestine Studies and Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad's work on settler colonialism in Algeria. I have discussed this connection at a workshop which was held at Chicago Sociology for the first edition in English of Bourdieu's Uprooting in 2020. Here you find the recording of part of the event (unfortunately the opening talk by Loic Wacquant is not there but please check out talks by Amin Perez and George Steinmetz):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEX9pYujFXY&t=1003s


I have also conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork around asylum reception centers across Italian Southern and Northern towns. The first two publications from this project on displacement and refugees in Italy can be found in The Middle East Report (2016) and Qualitative Sociology (2022, with Noemi Casati)


I am also co-editor (with Dr Romola Sanyal, LSE Geography) of a book, titled Displacement: Global Conversations on Refuge, published with Manchester University Press (June 2020). This book draws on cases from different regions of the world to undertake a critical examination of the shifting mechanisms and unequal paths underpinning the global humanitarian management of displacement.It also offers new theoretical tools for studying different structural and experiential dimensions of displacement (in camps, cities, on the move, in everyday relations with citizens, street-level bureaucrats, civil society actors, etc). Reviews of this edited book can be found in Ethnic & Racial Studies (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2022.2045030) and in the LSE Review of Books (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2022/02/23/book-review-displacement-global-conversations-on-refuge-edited-by-silvia-pasquetti-and-romola-sanyal/).


Since 2019 I have worked (with Prof Cathrine Degnen) with practitioners (The West End Refugee Centre, UK, and the Centre for Migration, Asylum, and International Cooperation, Parma, Italy) on multiple nested knowledge-exchange and engagement projects aimed to promote a rights-based approach centred on lived experience in how refugee charities work with people seeking asylum and how they deal with increasingly hostile policy environments. Some of this work has been funded by Newcastle University (Sociology subject area; Social Justice Cluster) and some by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF). The first publication from this project can be found in Refuge (forthcoming 2025).



Postgraduate Supervision

I would be happy to discuss potential postgraduate supervision with any student interested in working on any of the following topics: surveillance and the security state; humanitarianism and refugees; moral economies of justice; emotions and political action; militarism, the state, and the city; urban marginality, the sociology of Palestinians, settler colonialism, law, violence, and moralities of justice, migration and global (de)coloniality.


I have successfully supervised four PhD students to completion:

Ankita Mukherjee (Newcastle University Research Excellence Academy Funding).Exploring the discriminatory practices and social support networks of the Hijra community: A qualitative study of the 'third gender' in Delhi. (co-supervised with Prof Diane Richardson)

Silvia Maritati (Newcastle University Research Excellence Academy). Asylum, Inequality, and Sense of Place in Peripheral Europe. (Co-supervised with Prof Cate Degnen)

Pilar Morena d’Alò (NUaCT). When the spiritual becomes political: colonial tensions in Argentinian ‘green wave’ feminist knowledge production. (co-supervised with Prof Diane Richardson and Dr Stephen Seely).

Gabriella Mwedzi. Forgotten Women: An Intersectional Investigation into Black Christian Responses to Intimate Partner Violence in the UK (co-supervised with Dr Geth Rees).


I am currently supervising 6 PhD students:


Hala Shoman (ESRC funded). Palestinian Women at the Intersection of Colonial and Patriarchal Violence: Societal Renegotiations of Religion and Tradition in Gaza (writing).

Emily Upson (ESRC funded). How do advocacy networks work? The case of Uyghur advocacy (writing)

Stuti Pradhan (ESRC funded). Sikkimese Women’s Differentiated Citizenship: Postcoloniality, Indigeneity, and Gender in India (writing).

Brightman Makoni (ESRC funded) The Production and Policing on New Categories of Migrants: Zimbabwean migrant families and the UK Health and Care Worker Visa Scheme (3rd year)

Danlei Huang. Returning to Rural China: The Interplay Between Rural Power Structures and Women Returnees' Multidimensional Agency.(2nd year)

Farah Qadi (ESRC funded): ​​Humanitarian Aid Misalignment and the Growth of Informal Markets in Gaza: Addressing Economic Settler-Colonialism Amidst War Conditions

Teaching

UG Teaching

I am the module leader for SOC2085 Refugees and Displacement: Borders, Camps, and Asylum (2nd year undergraduate sociology module) - running 25-26 (2nd semester).


MA Teaching

I teach on SOC8050 Migration, Mobilities, Inequalities (not in 25-26)


Publications