Dr Sarah Walker

Profile

Sarah Walker is a critical migration researcher. Now based in academia, her research is informed by her previous experience working as a support worker with asylum seekers in the UK, including children in families, and researcher with the British Refugee Council working with unaccompanied minors. She is currently working as a visiting postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bologna funded by the Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Scholarship. This project builds on her PhD in Sociology (2021) which examined the transition to adulthood for young African men, bureaucratically labelled 'unaccompanied minors', who have made the perilous, illegalized journey to Italy. Using the minor as lens, her research interrogates the borderwork of race and childhood. Employing creative qualitative research methods, her work examines the intersections of migration, race, age, gender, and citizenship, and more recently, the environment.

Research

Publications

Walker, S. (2023) ‘The (unaccompanied) minor as mobility: the tactics of young African migrants in Italy to contest spatio-temporal control’, Children’s Geographies

Walker, S. (2022) ‘Weathering the ill wind: the affective and embodied dimensions of anti-immigrant political discourses on Young African men in Italy’, Antipode

Walker, S. and Gunaratnam, Y. (2021) ‘Young, unauthorised and Black – African unaccompanied minors and becoming an adult in Italy’, Journal of Sociology

Expertise