Dr Lorena Gazzotti has a PhD in Development Studies,University of Cambridge; BA and MA in Foreign Languages, University of Bologna.
Dr Gazzotti is the Lucy Cavendish Alice Tong Sze Research Fellow and will be based at CRASSH during the period of her Fellowship. Her work explores the containment of people deemed “dangerous” to the security of late liberal societies. She mainly focuses on the Spanish-Moroccan border as a space of inquiry and on border control as an analytical frame to investigate the emergence of new tools to contain marginalised and racialised populations at the frontiers of inequality.
Dr Gazzotti's first book, “Immigration Nation. Aid, control and border politics in Morocco”, is now under contract with Cambridge University Press and will be published in late 2021. Based on almost a year of fieldwork, the project explores the rise of ‘Sub-Saharan migrants’ as beneficiaries of the aid industry in Morocco. She analyses how aid-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and International Organisations (IOs) have emerged and encroached into the Moroccan migration governance landscape since the mid-2000s, and how the ‘aid-ification’ of migration governance merges with situated dynamics of neoliberal and authoritarian reordering.
During Dr Gazzotti's fellowship at Lucy Cavendish College and CRASSH, she will also start a new project on the control of child mobility in the Canary Islands and in Melilla. She will explore how the tension between geographies of remoteness, infrastructures of neglect and international human right duties transform these remote border sites in a charged political space. This project is funded by the British Academy, the Society for Libyan Studies, the Royal Geographical Society and the Cambridge Humanities Research Fund.
