Dr. Anna Finiguerra

Campus: Lisbon

Dr Anna Finiguerra holds a PhD in Political Science from Queen Mary University of London. Her PhD research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, won the 2024 EISA Best Dissertation Award. She collaborated as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ESCR-funded project New Investigator Project ‘Practice, Assemblage, and Emergence in the Governance of Freight Shipping’ in the Department of Defence Studies at King’s College London. 

• 2026. Uncharted Passages: A Genealogy of Stowaways between National Borders and Global Infrastructures”, MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025, Seal of Excellence

Over the past decades, the exercise of border control has been increasingly externalised to private and commercial actors beyond the nation-state. Scholars focusing on these dynamics have analysed how these practices raise questions related to the exercise of sovereignty and the respect of human rights. Yet, while the privatisation and externalisation of border control have been described as a relatively recent phenomenon, certain forms of border control have always been privatised. The governance of stowaways on cargo ships is one such example. Every year, thousands of people stow away on commercial ships. Stowaways are treated as a security risk and an economic liability, as they are simultaneously illegalised migrants and an obstacle to the routine operations of commercial ships, whose smooth running is crucial for the functioning of the global economy. The chief governors of stowaways are shipping insurance companies, whose “claim managers” oversee a transnational network of port authorities, border enforcers and crews on site to facilitate the resolution of stowaway incidents. Stowaways emerge at the intersection of the bordering practices of nation-states and the functioning of the global shipping industry, providing a privileged entry point to investigate the history connecting borders and private commercial infrastructure. This project, therefore, maps the hybrid public-private infrastructure that manages stowaways, investigating how the mobility of ships and trade infrastructure is entangled with forms of border control and human immobility. It sheds new light on ongoing debates regarding the privatisation of border control and forms of offshore detention by investigating the contemporary governance of stowaways and its historical development. In doing so, it demonstrates the long history of private forms of border control

• 2019 – 2023. “Ecologies of Visibility: Assembling the Politics of Mobility through Multiple Practices of Knowledge Production”, Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarship, QMUL

(In)visibility is part of discussions on the politics of human mobility, both empirically and theoretically. Scholars have recognised how becoming visible can be a resource for migrant subjects to make political claims, while it may also make them vulnerable to violence. Similarly, invisibility has been understood as both the result of exclusionary practices by political authorities and a conscious choice on the part of mobile people to escape mechanisms of mobility management. The argument of this thesis is that to fully understand the political stakes of (in)visibility one must take into account how forms of (in)visibility are produced in situated ways by a variety of actors, beyond political authorities and mobile people themselves. (In)visibility as such is the outcome of multiple, entangled processes of knowledge production which assemble migration by alternatively seeing or unseeing its subjects, spaces, timelines and dynamics, producing multiple “ecologies of visibility”. Such practices include efforts to memorialise migration, the artistic curation or disposal of migratory debris as well as forensic investigations to identify the victims of border death, and have no univocal outcome. In order to analyse these dynamics, this thesis examines the construction of the Gateway to Europe in Lampedusa, the exhibition of a boat wreck at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and finally the forensic investigative operation carried out after the shipwreck of 18th April 2015. Each of these cases shows how material traces (a landmark, a wreck, and human remains) contribute to the production of multiple “ecologies of visibility” which entangle with one another and produce contextually both forms of seeing and of unseeing. In so doing, they shape the frames through which migration is made intelligible as a political and social phenomenon, constructing its political horizons.

•  2025, August 29th, ECD Publication Event “Publishing in Top-Tier Journals” for Early Career Researchers. European International Studies Association, Bologna, Italy.
• 2025, August 27th, Stowaways on Commercial Ships: Tracing a Disappearing Subject across History. European International Studies Association, Bologna, Italy.
• 2025, June 19th, From the Humanitarian Camp to the High Seas: Challenging the production of the exceptional through the everyday. British International Studies Association, Belfast, UK.
• 2025, March 5. (Epistemic) Inequalities in Climate Governance: The IMO Marine Environmental Protection Committee. International Studies Association Conference, Chicago, USA.
• 2025, January 31. The Slipperiness of Empathy: Navigating through seas of (in)visibility and erasure Symposium. CRASSH Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. Invited contribution.
• 2024, August 27-31. Governing mobility at sea: the case of stowaways and protection and indemnity clubs. European International Studies Association Pan European Conference, Lille, France.
• 2024, July 3-5. Material Afterlives of Bordering: Between Worship and Exhibition. European Workshop for International Studies. Istanbul, Turkey. Invited presentation.
• 2024, June 5th-7th. Forecasting and Worldmaking in Global Policy, with Dr Alex Gould. British International Studies Association Conference 2024. Birmingham, UK
• 2024, April 2-6. Practically Becoming International Load Lines and the Epistemology of Global Rule-Making, with Dr Alex Gould. [Conference Session]. International Studies Association Conference 2024. San Francisco, CA, USA.
• 2023 September 9, Unravelling international spaces: an exploratory discussion, EISA PEC, Potsdam, Germany.
• 2023, March 21-22. Forensic Identification as Governance of Migratory Movement: Reifying the Gaze of the State in the Forensic Laboratory. STS-MIGTEC Workshop, Bologna and online. 
• 2022, September 1-4. Migratory Debris: Dumps, Laboratories and Displays as Archives. European International Studies Association Pan European Conference, Athens, Greece.
• 2022, July 6-9. Threading Connections: Material Afterlives of Migratory Debris. European Workshop for International Studies, Thessaloniki, Greece. 
• 2022, June 15-17. Making Waste into Art, and Art into Waste: the Multiple Afterlives of Migratory Traces. British International Studies Association Annual Conference, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. 
• 2022, February 15-17. Re-imagining Mobility: Stitching Together the View from the Gateway to Europe. STS-MIGTEC Workshop, online.
• 2021, June 18-19. The Gateway to Europe: Misreading Europe’s Borders. Border Abolition Conference, online. 

• 2022, General Research Fund, Queen Mary University of London. 
• 2019, Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarship, Queen Mary University of London.