Francesca Esposito is a community psychologist and a Research Fellow at ICS-Lisboa. She completed her PhD in Community Psychology at the ISPA-University Institute of Lisbon in 2019 and, afterwards, she was a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford and a Lecturer at the University of Westminster, London (UK).
Research Fellow: Social Psychology
Institute of Social Sciences (ICS), University of Lisbon (UL)
Francesca’s research focuses primarily on immigration detention in Portugal, Italy and the UK. Mixing qualitative/quantitative interviews and participant observations, she critically examines the life and experiences of people inside immigration detention centres. Particularly, her recent project, entitled Making Gender Visible in Immigration Detention, looks at the gendered and racialised experiences of detained women and at their strategies of survival and resistance. Francesca is interested in participatory methodologies and feminist community psychology approaches, and in her work she combines scholarly research, community-based intervention and activism. Francesca is an Associate Director of Border Criminologies (University of Oxford), and a member of the Executive Board of the European Community Psychology Association (ECPA). She is also a member of the feminist NGO BeFree (Rome, Italy) and she worked for several years with people, mainly women, surviving both gender-based violence and border violence.
Keywords: immigrant detention, border violence and resistance, genders, intersectionality, participatory action-research