Danai Avgeri

Danai Avgeri is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Teaching Associate in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Bridging political geography and political economy, her research is broadly concerned with how state power and capital intersect to regulate and profit from the im/mobility of people and commodities. Danai received her PhD in Geography from Queen Mary, University of London, in 2022. Building on extensive multi-sited and multi-scalar ethnographic fieldwork along the EU-Turkey borderland, her thesis examined how emergent spatio-legal formations—such as humanitarian corridors, island hotspots, and containment zones—reorganise traditional territorial frameworks, temporal registers, and forms of capital accumulation. From 2021 to 2022, Danai was an Academy Fellow at Chatham House, where she examined migrant access to healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the intersecting dynamics of medicalisation and the securitisation of borders. Between 2022 and 2024, she was an ESRC postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, where her research centred on regimes of racialised extractivism through modes of refugee rentierism at Europe's peripheries. Between September and October 2025, Danai was a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, where she started working on a new research project on corporate borders in port-cities. This project extends her focus from the governance of human mobility to the spatial politics of maritime transport, revealing a shared rentier dynamic in processes of border insourcing and logistical intermediation.
Alongside her research, Danai has led significant academic and public engagement projects. Between 2022 and 2024, she founded and co-convened the Study Group on Borders, Colonialism, and Migration at the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, University of Cambridge. In 2024, she organized and led the international conference “Debordering Futures: Racial Capitalism, Coloniality, and Migrant Justice” at CRASSH, University of Cambridge. Danai’s research has been published in leading academic journals, including Political Geography and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Danai has delivered invited talks and presented her research across multiple institutions, such as Stanford University, UCLA, the University of Bologna, and SOAS University of London.