Bio
Danai Avgeri is a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University and a Postdoctoral Researcher and Teaching Associate in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. She is also an Affiliate Scholar in the Department of International Development at King’s College London. Her research explores how state power and capital intersect to regulate and profit from the (im)mobility of people and commodities, engaging political geography, political economy, critical migration and humanitarian studies, anthropology of the state, infrastructure studies, and critical policy analysis.
She received her PhD in Geography from Queen Mary, University of London, in 2022. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork along the EU–Turkey borderland, her thesis examined how spatio-legal formations such as humanitarian corridors, island hotspots, and containment zones reorganise territorial frameworks, temporalities, and forms of capital accumulation. From 2021 to 2022, she was an Academy Fellow at Chatham House, where she studied migrant access to healthcare during COVID-19 and the intersections of medicalisation and border securitisation. Between 2022 and 2024, she was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at the University of Cambridge, researching racialised extractivism and refugee rentierism at Europe’s peripheries.
In 2025, Danai began working on a project on the energy–logistics nexus in Eastern Mediterranean ports, extending her focus from the governance of human mobility to the spatial politics of maritime transport, and revealing shared rentier dynamics in border insourcing and energy intermediation.
Alongside her research, she has led academic and public engagement initiatives. At Cambridge, she co-founded the Study Group on Borders, Colonialism, and Migration (2022–24) and convened the international conference Debordering Futures: Racial Capitalism, Coloniality, and Migrant Justice (2024). Her work has been published in leading journals, such as Political Geography and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and she has shared her insights on platforms including the Undercurrents Podcast and Open Democracy. She is currently working on a book, Hostile Hosts: Bordering Crisis and Refugee Extractivism at Europe’s Frontiers.
Publications
Avgeri, D. (2025) Keeping out by keeping alive: Refugee Rentierism, Racialized Containment and the Humanitarian-Development Nexus in Transit States, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. OnlineFirst, Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02637758251344061
Avgeri, D. (2025). Medicalising Borders, Bordering Health: Governing Asylum-Seekers’ Mobility and Welfare at the Greek Hotspots. In Follis, L., Follis, K., & Burns, N. (Eds.), Migrant and Refugee Access to Health Systems: Challenging (Im)mobilities in Healthcare. Edward Elgar, 70 – 83.
Avgeri, D. (2024). Avgeri, D. (2024). Humanitarian Capitalism: The Labour Regime of Αid and the Surrogate Welfare State in Times of Global Displacement. Political Geography 114. 103 – 167. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629824001161
Avgeri, D. et al. (2024) Debordering Futures, Reclaiming Migrant Narratives, The Other Side of Hope 4(1).
Avgeri, D. (2022). Migration Studies and Colonialism. International Affairs, 98(2), 776 – 778.
Avgeri, D. et al. (2017). Balkan Refugee Trail: A Pathway to European Solidarity. Interkulturelles Zentrum.
Forthcoming:
Avgeri, D. Uncomfortable Methods: Activating the Impasses of Scholar-Activism in Critical Geographies of ‘Migration Crises’. Accepted in Antipode.
Avgeri, D., Bhagat, A., & Morris, J.C. Special Issue: Frontiers of Value in Migration Governance. Forthcoming in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.
In preparation:
Hostile Hosts: Bordering Crisis and Refugee Extractivism at Europe’s Frontiers (manuscript)