Jennifer Allsopp

Jennifer Allsopp PhD is a writer, activist and academic whose inter-disciplinary work covers topics including social justice, human rights, migration, asylum, class, gender and social policy. She is interested in ontology and narrative - how the stories we tell about ourselves and others shape our individual and collective wellbeing, as well as how stories and myths shape policy and politics.

Her current work centres on how people move and mobilise to support what they perceive to be viable futures for themselves, their families and their societies in the context of migration.

Alongside being a Birmingham Fellow, Jennifer is a Senior Visiting Fellow with the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, a Research Associate with the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford and a regular advisor to the European Parliament.

A keen advocate of collaborative working, Jennifer’s first book, Policing Humanitarianism: EU Anti-Smuggling Policies and their Impact on Civil Society (Hart, 2019) explores the nexus between the anti-smuggling policies of the European Union’s Home Affairs agencies and its Member States, and the policing and criminalization of humanitarian assistance to migrants and refugees. It reports on extensive fieldwork which she conducted in Hungary and Serbia, Italy, Greece, the UK and France between 2015 and 2018 at the height of the so-called European ‘refugee crisis’.

Jennifer’s second book, Youth Migration and the Politics of Wellbeing (Bristol University Press, 2020) is co-authored with Dr Elaine Chase. It is the product of a cutting-edge four-year participatory research project, Becoming Adult, which examined the wellbeing trajectories of over 100 unaccompanied young migrants and refugees in Europe.

Jennifer is currently working on two monographs.

Before joining Birmingham, Jennifer worked for two years at Harvard University as a Postdoctoral Fellow in International Migration and Coordinator the Immigration Initiative at Harvard (IIH) where she led the global Immigration Fellows program and policy research brief series. She also organized a global online conference which attracted a live audience of 700 early career scholars from across the five continents. Prior to this, Jennifer worked as a Research Fellow with the London International Development Centre Migration Leadership Team (LIDC-MLT) where she co-developed a participatory strategy for global migration research for the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social, and Arts and Humanities Research Councils. As part of this work, Jennifer co-convened migration conversations with a range of stakeholders in 12 locations around the world including in Delhi, Nairobi, Medellin, London, New York, Thessaloniki, Barcelona, Brussels, Beirut and Johannesburg.

Jennifer has previously worked for the United Nations; as a strategist with a range of non-for-profits; as a researcher at the Universities of Oxford, Exeter, Birmingham, Queen Mary and the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London); and as a consultant with the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS). For six years, she worked as a commissioning editor for the human rights and social justice platform openDemocracy 50.50 where she reported on questions of gender equality, social justice and migration from around the world.