Research interests: Critical migration and border studies, deportation, anthropology and sociology of state and law, critical race studies, migration justice movements

Doctoral research project: Policing the „Deportation Gap“ in Germany – Asylum, State Violence and West Africans’ Responses. The study examines by means of multi-sited ethnography the everyday governance or policing of the deportation gap in the German asylum system. It asks how West African rejected asylum seekers encounter and respond to administrative and enforcement practices by multiple state agents and institutions concerned with persons under pending deportation – the asylum administration, police, immigration authority, camp, detention, criminal court, among others. The study interrogates the particular institutions, practices and instruments of governance that emerge within this (contested) field. Central is the so-called Duldung, an administrative suspension of deportation, a form of legal “illegality” and a quasi-permit. The study critically examines the prevalent understandings of sovereignty and state-ness, drawing from fieldwork, West African migration movements’ historical analyses, and social and political theory. Funded by Kone Foundation.

Korvensyrjä is since 2015 a co-researcher in the interdisciplinary, activist research collective Culture of Deportation and was the coordinator in the project Welcome to Europe? realised by the collective and funded by Kone Foundation. In 2017 an online archive was created which documents the German tradition of criminalising migration and the EU model of border externalisation, focusing on the knowledge and analyses generated in migrant self-organisation (http://cultureofdeportation.org/). Since 2018 Culture of Deportation has documented and campaigned against racist police and security guard violence in southern German asylum camps together with local asylum seeker groups and other activist groups. Korvensyrjä is also conducting antiracist trial-monitoring with Justizwatch.

Korvensyrjä received her Master of Social Science degree in Social Science History in June 2015 (Excellent). She is currently doctoral student at the Department of Social Research (Sociology), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. She is also affiliated to the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN).