Dr Karen Schouw Iversen, BA (SOAS), MSc (LSE), PhD (SOAS)

Profile

Dr Karen Schouw Iversen joined SPIR in September 2023 as a lecturer in Politics/International Politics of Development. She completed her PhD in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, and holds an MSc in Conflict Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In the past, Karen has taught at the LSE, University of Birmingham, and SOAS, and she is recognised as an Advance HE Fellow (FHEA).

Karen’s research explores migration, humanitarian aid, and resistance in Latin America. To date, her work has focused on activism related to internal displacement in Colombia, where the state has rolled out an extensive set of humanitarian policies targeting the millions of people internally displaced due to the country’s civil conflict. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with internally displaced populations, her research has explored how humanitarian assistance has shaped state-citizen relations. In her work, Karen has argued that humanitarian policies and discourses often provide opportunities that the internally displaced can utilise for activism and resistance. More broadly, Karen is interested in the complex relationship between humanitarian assistance, power, and resistance in experiences of migration, and adopts a Foucauldian approach to analysing these relationships.

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Teaching

POL255 Colonialism, Capitalism and Development

POL257 The International Politics of the Developing World

Research

Research Interests:

• Migrant resistance
• Borders
• Forced migration
• Humanitarianism

Publications

Journal articles:

Schouw Iversen, K. (2022) ‘Displacement, time and resistance: The role of waiting in facilitating occupations led by internally displaced persons in Colombia’, Time & Society, 31(2), pp. 226–246. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X211052838. 

Schouw Iversen, K. (2022) ‘Participation as Confrontation: Resistance Within and Outside the Mesas de Participación Established for IDPs in Colombia’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 35(3), pp. 1327–1343. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feac010.

Book chapters:

Schouw Iversen, K. (2023) ‘Struggles around housing: La Plaza De La Hoja in Colombia’, in S.M. Hughes (ed.) Critical Geographies of Resistance. Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 153–167. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800882881.00019.