Research Focus Areas

Short Biography

Danai Avgeri is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Teaching Associate in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in Geography from Queen Mary, University of London, and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge. Her research lies at the intersection of political geography, political economy, critical migration and humanitarian studies, anthropology of the state, critical policy analysis.
Danai’s research investigates how state power and racial capitalism shape borders, migration, and humanitarian interventions, with a particular focus on the weaponization of space and temporality to restrict specific forms of human mobility. Her current work delves into regimes of racialized extractivism and capital accumulation, notably through the rise of refugee rentierism at Europe’s peripheries. Through an analysis of transformations in migration governance, Danai’s research seeks to illuminate the evolving roles of the state, international organisations and labor amid global capitalist crises and restructuring.

Selected Publications

• 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.
• Avgeri, D. (forthcoming) Medicalising Borders, Bordering Health: Governing Asylum-seekers’ Mobility and Welfare at the Greek hotspots in Follis, L., Follis, K. and Burns N. (eds), Migrant and Refugee Access to Health Systems: Challenging (Im)mobilities in Healthcare, Edward Elgar.
• Avgeri, D. (forthcoming) Keeping out by keeping alive: Racialised Extractivism and the Refugee Humanitarian-Development Fix in the Europeripheries. Accepted in Special Issue: Racial Capitalism and Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
• Avgeri, D. (forthcoming) Uncomfortable Methods: Activating the Impasses of Scholar-activism in Critical Geographies of ‘Migration Crises.’ Accepted in Antipode.

Book review:

• Avgeri, D. (2022) Migration Studies and Colonialism, International Affairs, 98(2).

In preparation:

• ‘Frontiers of Value in Migration Governance’  Special Issue co-edited with Dr. Ali Bhagat and Dr. Julia Morris.