Christina joined Loughborough University in September 2013 as Lecturer in International Relations. Prior to working at Loughborough, she worked at the University of Sussex, where she also completed her doctoral research.
Christina is affiliated with the Institute for Diplomacy and International Governance, Loughborough University London as well as with the Refugee Law Initiative, School of Advanced Studies, University of London. She is currently member of the editorial team of the Journal of Common Market Studies.
Christina has a multi-disciplinary background with degrees in Social Policy, Politics and Law; Intercultural Work, Human Rights and Conflict Management; and Research Methods awarded by Universities in both Germany and the UK.
Outside of academia, she has worked for several years in organisations relevant to the social sciences including the UNHCR Branch office in Berlin and an INGO in Geneva with consultative status to UN agencies.
Christina's research on governance, migration, including forced migration, missing persons and violence is geopolitical in character and draws upon Critical International Theory for example through reading scholars such as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Michel Foucault.
Currently she is particularly concerned with questions of transformations in migration governance, conceptual questions around violence and disappearance and genealogies of freedom of movement and constructions of gender. She works with colleagues in West Africa on questions of migration.
Her doctoral work, completed in 2012, is an interdisciplinary study in Geography and International Relations entitled ‘Migration Management: the radical violence of the international politics of migration’. In this work, questions are asked about the construction of the migrant as a particular political subject framed in the context of changes in the doctrine formation of international migration since the 1980s. Migration Management raises important questions about normative violence, governance and ethics.
Since 2005, Christina has also participated in several large research projects which included international academic as well as non-academic partners. These projects broadly fall into research areas covering development studies, and more concretely the development of public policy on migration and poverty.
Christina teaches predominantly in International Relations. She teaches both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. At postgraduate level, she currently convenes courses including Philosophical Foundations of Social Science Research, Research Design, and International Politics: Issues and Policies. At Undergraduate level, she currently convenes Critical Security Studies.
Christina is actively involved in, and enjoys being, a supervisor to students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Christina welcomes research proposals from students that are gender-aware and anti-racist in character in the following areas:
- Refugee studies, Critical Migration and Border Studies;
- Development, Conflict and Post-conflict reconstruction
- Critical questions about normative violence and/or governance;
- Contemporary international relations theory, especially poststructuralist, discourse theoretical approaches and ethics.
Current Postgraduate Research Students
- Frances Howe (2021 - ) “Memory, oral histories and archives within eco-anarchist movements”
- Pragya Rai (2020 - ) “The interrelationship between misogyny and radical right violence and terrorism” (family leave cover)
- Ibrahim Magara (2018-) "International Mediation in the South Sudanese Peace Process"
Recent Postgraduate Research Students
- Aminu Muhammad (2021) " The Politics of Negotiation and Agreement: A Case Study of Nigeria–UK Negotiations and Agreements on Immigration Returns and Transfer of Sentenced Persons 2005–2014”
- James Ellison (2019) "Contested Evidence: Visual Representations of Border Violence in Calais, France"
- Thanachate Wisaijorn (2018) "River/land Border Practices: Everyday Lives across the Thai-Lao Mekong Border"
The Evolution of Migration Management in the Global North
2017 – Routledge
By Christina Oelgemöller
The Evolution of Migration Management in the Global North explores how the radically violent migration management paradigm that dominates today's international migration has been assembled. Drawing on unique archive material, it shows how a forum of diplomats and civil servants constructed the 'transit country' as a site in which the illegal migrant became the main actor to be vilified. Policy-makers are divided between those who oppose migration, and those who support it, so long as it is properly managed. Any other position is generally seen at best as utopian.
Books
- Oelgemöller, Christina (2017) The Evolution of Migration Management in the Global North, Routledge, Interventions Series
Special Issues
- Oelgemöller, Christina (2020) (sole editorship) Introduction to The Global Compacts, Mixed Migration and the transformation of Protection, Interventions, 8 pages
Peer-reviewed Articles
- with Borelli, L; Pinkerton, P; Scheel, S and Juenemann, A (2021) Agency within Mobility: Conceptualising the Geopolitics of Migration Management Forum Geopolitics DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2021.1973733
- Oelgemöller, Christina (2020) Mixed Migration and the Vagaries of Doctrine Formation since 2015 – Colonial and Paternal Protection? Interventions https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2020.1845771
- Oelgemöller, Christina, L Ansems de Vries and K Groenendijk (2020) The Crafting of a Paradox: Schengen inside and out International Journal of Migration and Border Studies 6(1/2): 7-25
- Oelgemöller, Christina and K Allinson (2020) Instituting the Responsible Migrant Law and Critique 31(2): 183-207
- Oelgemöller, Christina (2017) The Illegal, The Missing: An Evaluation of Conceptual Inventions. Millennium: Journal of international studies.46(1), pp.24–40.
- Oelgemöller, Christina (2016) International Migration: Transit space - creative space? Int. J. of Migration and Border Studies. 3 (2-3), pp. 121-138.
- Oelgemöller, Christina (2011) Informal Plurilateralism: The Impossibility of Multilateralism in the Steering of Migration The British Journal of Politics and International Relations Vol 13 pp. 110-126
- Oelgemöller, Christina (2010) Transit and Suspension: Migration Management or the Metamorphosis of Asylum Seekers into 'Illegal' Immigrants Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Vol 37 pp. 407-424
Other Publications
- Oelgemöller, Christina (2021) Gender, the International Community and ‘best practice’ interventions in migration and development, MigChoice Policy Brief No. 3
- Oelgemöller, Christina (2020) Freedom of Movement in West Africa: A snap shot of the history and future of regulating mobility, MigChoice Policy Brief No. 1
- with Nicholas Maple, Refugee Law Initiative (2019) GCM Indicators: Objective 23, RLI blogs
- Oelgemöller, Christina, Refugee Law Initiative (2019) GCM Indicators: Objective 19, RLI blogs
- with Nicholas Maple, Refugee Law Initiative (October 2018) GCM Commentary: Objective 23: Strengthen international cooperation and global partnerships for safe, orderly and regular migration https://rli.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2018/10/22/gcm-commentary-objective-23/