Dr Aila Spathopoulou

I joined the department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Stirling as a Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology on 1st January 2024. I am also an editor in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies.

In February 2025, I completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2022-2025) that interrogated the uneven spatio-temporalities of refuge/asylum and return from and across Europe and the UK with a particular focus on how ferries, cruise ships and barges are being used as offshore floating prisons for people racialised and criminalised as "refugees", "displaced people", "asylum seekers" and "migrants". Forthcoming publications from this project, include the following:

Spathopoulou, A. (2025). ‘Displacing border violence: Floating prisons, everyday incarcerations and abolitionist journeys’. British Journal of Community Justice.

Spathopoulou, A. (forthcoming). ‘Walking and stopping together in the carceral context of Portland’. In: Snellgrove, M. (ed.) Leisured Walking: Mobilities, Encounters and Critical Engagement. Routledge.

Aldegheri, E. and Spathopoulou, A. (accepted for publication) ‘Imaginaries of ‘refugee journeys’ into Europe and practices of inhospitality pending return’. Language and Intercultural Communication.

I hold a PhD from the department of Geography at King’s College University, London. My monograph "Bordering and Governmentality around the Greek islands" published by Palgrave Macmillan (2023), is based on (auto)ethnographic work on the Aegean border islands in Greece during the so-called "refugee crisis" and its "aftermath" (2015-2020).

Since 2019, I am co-coordinator at the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research (FAC research) in Athens. My work with my collaborators at FAC research, has shaped my analysis and understanding of theory, 'crises', border violence and border abolition through feminist perspectives. At FAC I co-organise the annual 'Feminist No Borders Summer School'. Together with the Legal Centre Lesvos and FAC research we co-authored a research report titled "A pandemic of Abuses" that documents how Greece dismantled the right to asylum and normalised the violation of migrants' rights throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in Lesvos: https://legalcentrelesvos.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/A-Pandemic-of-Abuses.pdf Together with Deanna Dadusc, Camille Gendrot and Anna Carastathis, as FAC research, we designed an online community course that was delivered in Spring 2023 (see syllabus:https://feministresearch.org/community-courses/#RCF). In this course, we brought together no-border activists and scholars engaged in the struggle against the criminalisation of facilitation, as well as people who have been directly criminalised by the EU border regime. From the recordings of the course, we created a podcast series (available on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/224L5XOvWVmD2LdKC6v8Lw?si=a3afeebd6f7d4cb6&nd=1&dlsi=0e57f8930d2a433b). The online course and podcast series are part of discussions that have taken place over the past years on the relationship between struggles against borders, the illegalisation of people on the move, and the criminalisation of any form of facilitation to freedom of movement, within our no border networks, including the Captain Support Network, borderline europe, Watch-the-Med Alarm Phone, the Baye Fall crew, Clinica Legale Roma 3, Lesvos Legal Centre, Sportello Sans Papier of Arci Porco Rosso, and more recently the Maldusa project. For further information see: D. Dadusc, C. Gendrot, A. Spathopoulou and A. Carastathis. (2024) Criminalising Freedom of Movement: a course and a podcast series. Available at:https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/border-criminologies-blog/blog-post/2024/09/criminalising-freedom-movement-course-and-podcast. Accessed on: 11/05/2025

My key research interests are in the criminalisation of migration, border violence, the political economies surrounding border violence, carceral spaces (including island detention, ships and seas), harm (including forms of self-harm), border and prison abolition, practices of refusal and auto-ethnography and fiction. I am particularly interested in the ways in which border violence becomes inscribed in racialised and gendered ways on people’s bodies. Central to my research is understanding how borders cut through our bodies and shape our most intimate relationships and how we relate to our very self.

My research focus for many years has been on the Aegean border islands, particularly Lesvos, a place that I consider both a home that I am always returning to and a prison from which I seek to escape...

I am currently part of the research project ‘Exposing and Combating the Political Economy of Border Violence in the Aegean’, a collaborative research project with the Legal Centre Lesvos, Dr Lauren Martin (University of Durham), Dr Geoff Boyce (University Collage Dublin) and Dr Anna Carastathis (Feminist Autonomous Centre for research). The present research project which was initially named the 'Industry of Pushbacks' came out of the strong need to find alternative ways to document and fight border violence against people on the move. The Legal Centre Lesvos already contributed to the present project by carrying out the initial research which allowed the identification of over 1,000 border-related contracts from 2020–2022 and the documentation of approximately €2 billion in procurement. This research is supported by the University of Durham, which has provided £15,000 in funding for data collection and analysis and the organisation of a workshop in September 2025 where we will present the database to legal experts, human right organisations and researchers. Through this research, we noticed that the exposure of the border economy could, beyond the pushbacks, also extend to the contracts leading to the construction, maintenance and operation of closed camps built to detain and deport people racialised and criminalised as 'migrants' in Lesvos. With the support of the IAA (Impact, Acceleration, Account) grant from the University of Stirling, amount of £5,000 award, we are developing the first comprehensive and searchable public online database documenting Greek border-related outsourcing contracts. The online public database will be a crucial tool for Legal Centre Lesvos's daily work and that of other activists, non-profits, investigative journalists, academics and researchers focusing on the consequences of border control at Europe’s external(ised) borders. The project is also an opportunity for to re-think and expand litigation strategies and avenues for extended accountability for human rights violations that affect people on the move.

In Scotland, my other home from my mother's side, I am (re)turning to the Scottish Highlands and Islands and embarking on a new research journey. In this geographical region that is represented as being remote, melancholic and isolating, I am (un)learning old and new meanings from experiences related to migration and belonging, arrival and departure, moving on and returning, harm and healing, research and writing.

One of my latest joint projects has been thinking and writing together with Dr Isabel Meier (Northumbria University) on practices of refusal as relating otherwise within specific locations of struggle. Inspired by Indigenous and Black feminist writers, activists, and thinkers we approach relating otherwise as a ‘mode of engagement’ – not a theory or method – that shapes relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world. Our thinking about refusal also emerged from our engagement with different movements against borders and our involvement in diverse anti-racist, trans-feminist, and abolitionist activist collectives and spaces (e.g. Feminist Autonomous Centre for research 2023, the Feminist No Borders Summer School) and anti-racist No Borders/border abolition groups mobilising for a world without borders and prisons. You can find our Special Issue and the wonderful contributions from which we learned so much on practices of refusal, in open access in Fennia: An International Journal of Geography. https://fennia.journal.fi/issue/view/8956

In the meantime, I am continuing to follow ferries across Europe, Scotland and England, to understand how they immobilize people in offshore, floating prisons, which nonetheless can potentially become mobile vehicles of deportation but also sites of resistance and liberation.

I co-convene the undergraduate dissertation module SSPC Dissertations and convene the postgraduate module Reflexivity and Observation (CRMP030/31). I am, also, co-teaching the postgraduate module Criminological Perspectives (CRMP010/11). I contribute to undergraduate and postgraduate modules for criminology on the criminalisation of migration and border criminologies. In Spring 2026, I will be convening a postgraduate module that I am currently developing based on my research and activism: Border Violence, Carceral Sites and Migrant Justice (CRMP02B). I was delighted and moved to be awarded a 2025 RATE award for Outstanding Academic Mentorship.