Barak Kalir
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
- Senior Researcher
Barak Kalir is an Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. He is the co-director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies and is currently involved in the H2020 ADMIGOV project: Advancing Alternative Migration Governance. Barak has recently rounded off an ERC-funded project entitled: “The Social Life of State Deportation Regimes”, where together with a team of researchers he ethnographically documented and analyzed the views, motivations and practices of state bureaucrats and civil-society actors, directly involved in deportation of illegalized migrants in several countries around the world: Ecuador, France, Greece, Israel, the Netherlands, and Romania.
Among his recent publications are: To Deport or to Adopt” (2020, Ethnography), “Departheid: The Draconian Governance of Illegalized Migrants in Western States” (2019, Conflict and Society), “Repressive Compassion: Deportation Caseworkers Furnishing an Emotional Comfort Zone in Encounters with Illegalized Migrants” (2019, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review), and two special issues: “Nonrecording states: between legibility and looking away” (2017, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology) and “Re‐searching access: what do attempts at studying migration control tell us about the state?” (2019, Social Anthropology).