Christina Oelgemoller

Senior Lecturer in International Relations

Christina Oelgemoller

Christina joined Loughborough University in the Midlands in September 2013, where she is currently Doctoral Programme Lead for International Relations, Politics and History.

Christina's research on governance, migration, including forced migration, missing persons and violence is geopolitical in character and draws upon Critical International Theory.

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.

Academic background

Prior to working at Loughborough, she worked at the University of Sussex, where she also completed her doctoral research. 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 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.

Current research and collaborations

Currently Christina 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 some West African and continental European countries on questions of migration. This work was funded by the UK government and the IOM through a project called MigChoice.

Current PhD / research supervisions

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"

Completed PhD / research supervisions

Aminu Muhammad (2015-2021) " 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"

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