C.V. | Current Project | Publications
Research Interests
Critical Migration Studies; Asylum Regimes; Bureaucracy; Lived Surveillance; STS; Anthropology of Law; Political Theory; Postwar Europe; The Modern Mediterranean; Colonial Histories of Migration Control; Queer theory
Research Area(s)
The European Union, Greece, Turkey, Germany
Departmental Activities
Working Groups: Political Assembly
Research Topic:
Profile
Romm Lewkowicz’s research and teaching draw on political theory, critical legal studies, and ethnographic methodologies in an effort to revaluate our understanding of the history and experience of forced migration, asylum regulation, and post-war European integration.
His PhD research was a multi-sited ethnography of Eurodac, a pan-European apparatus for the biometric documentation of Europe’s asylum seekers, moving between Brussels, Izmir, Malta, the Greek island of Chios, and Berlin. Attending to both the biometric apparatus and its lived experience by asylum seekers on the move (mainly Syrians, Iraqis, and Yemenis), the project explores how the illegal migrant body has served as both a laboratory for experimentation in biometric documentation and a site for postwar European self-constitution.
Lewkowicz’s research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Max Planck Society, the European Research Council, The PublicsLab CUNY, Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin , and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective. Previously, Lewkowicz has held various positions in migrant rights NGOs, including the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants and the African Refugee Development Center (Tel Aviv), Detention Action (London) and Asylos – Research for Asylum (Brussels).