Karolína Augustová

Fellowship

IPC Fellowship

Granting institution

Period of the Fellowship

October 2020 - October 2021

Project title

Violent Impacts of EU’s Externalisation Politics on Refugees’ Everyday Mobility in Turkey

Project description

 This interdisciplinary research project at the nexus of international relations and sociology will explore how Turkish asylum and border practices, as negotiated within the European Union’s external border management, impact refugees’ everyday mobilities and experiences of violence at the local level. Previous scholarly findings show that Turkey, as a non-EU member country, is not only affecting but is also directly affected by bordering processes of migrants and refugees within the EU. For this reason, Turkey has been placed in the research focus of various studies investigating the EU’s externalization politics in the context of migration. Yet, scholarly research has failed to assess how diverse forms of violence, which are the core instruments and effects of the EU’s external border management, impact refugees’ everyday decisions, practices, and relations while navigating their journeys through Turkey. To address this research lacunae, this study will encounter refugees’ everyday experiences of violence in Turkey as well as EU-Turkey migration negotiations from the perspectives of political and NGO elites and seek how the micro and macro levels interconnect on the ground. To do so, qualitative research methods, such as participant observation and semi-structured interviews will be used. While considering public and policy outreach, this research will aim to communicate the data beyond academia, with the public, policy-makers, and activists.

Short biography

Karolína Augustová completed her PhD in Sociology and International Relations at Aston University (Birmingham, UK) with a thesis on border violence against refugees along the European Union’s border with Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2019, she held a visiting fellowship at the Institute for Migration Studies, Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon.

Augustová’s research examines refugees’ everyday experiences of border violence along Southeastern Europe and Turkey, as intertwined with the European Union’s externalization and border politics. She is particularly interested in how diverse forms of violence (direct/structural/cultural) affect every day social processes along the borders as well as the role intersectionality (masculinity, race with other locations) plays in border violence. She uses qualitative research tools, ethnographic fieldwork, and participatory methods (scholar activism in refugee camps and participatory photography) when conducting her research.

Her previous research, MA (Aston University, UK) and BA (Charles University, Czech Republic), focused on micropolitics in the post-Soviet and Southeastern European contexts: the risks of female homelessness in the Czech Republic, human rights of youth with disabilities in Ukrainian institutional care, and the unauthorized border crossings of male refugees along the “Balkan Route.”