
Dr Dan Godshaw
BA, MA, PhD
Expertise
I am a specialist in migration and borders, with a focus on state violence, harm, immigration detention, racism and masculinities.
Current positions
Lecturer in Criminology
School for Policy Studies
Contact
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Biography
After my MA, I worked as a visitor, researcher and campaigner with Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, who support people in and lobby for reform to UK immigration detention. I helped to produce research on the impacts of legal aid cuts in detention centres, and was an organising committee member for Refugee Tales, a creative campaigning project in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers and immigration detainees.
In 2015 I came to the University of Bristol to begin a PhD in Sociology, sought to uncover the harms of UK immigration detention through a gendered lens. After completion of my PhD in 2022, I worked on a coproduced project with affected communities to explore how to build reliable estimates of Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation, and on a 2023 paper that documents the exclusion of women and people of colour in just transition decision making in Bristol. After working for a year as a Teaching Associate in Sociology at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, I was appointed as Lecturer in Criminology at the School for Policy Studies in 2023.
Research interests
My research interests include immigration detention and borders, state violence and harm, migration and masculinities, and racism. As an activist-sociologist and interdisciplinary researcher, I collaborate closely with practitioners and civil society organisations in my work.
My doctoral research begins with the observation that men are disproportionately detained in Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) in the UK, yet research that considers the gendered dimensions of male detainment is rare. Through an ethnography of IRCs, I argue in my thesis, Men, masculinities, and the temporal necropolitics of UK immigration detention (2022), that detainment can be profoundly harmful, and that this harm results from systemic and instrumental violence. Furthermore, I contend that detention’s violence operates across two distinct yet interactional temporalities – slow and fast – and through multiple interrelated sites including the state, families, bodies and the IRC itself. These many forms of suffering are conceptualised as facets of postcolonial necropower, which exposes detainees to the threat of death and injury. While some are able to survive and resist in complex and contested ways, I contend, crucially, that detention’s violence is both gendered – mediated and experienced through intersectional gendered divisions and processes – and gendering – acting upon the production and performance of detainees’ masculinities.
Other recent collaborative research looks at the racist politics of the 2024 UK riots and the limitations of the carceral response (2025), as well as exploration of 'paradoxical representation' by elite Conservative politicians from ethnic minority backgrounds who actively harm racialised migrant communities and act as 'post-racial gatekeepers' (2024).
I am a member of Migration Mobilities Bristol, Bristol Social Harm and Crime Research Group, The Centre for the Study of Poverty and Social Justice and The Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship.
Publications
Selected publications
08/08/2020Becoming an Immigrant? Border Harms and “British” Men with Previous Convictions in British Immigration Removal Centers
Critical Criminology: An International Journal
Don't dump me in a foreign land
Don't dump me in a foreign land
Masculinities at the Border
Recent publications
13/08/2024The racist politics of mindless thuggery
Skinfolk, but not kinfolk? Ethnic minority conservative political elite actors
Skinfolk, But Not Kinfolk? Paradoxical Representation among Ethnic Minority Conservative Political Elites in the UK
Politics and Gender
Politics, Voice, and Just Transition
Global Social Challenges Journal
Becoming an Immigrant? Border Harms and “British” Men with Previous Convictions in British Immigration Removal Centers
Critical Criminology: An International Journal
Thesis
Men, masculinities, and the temporal necropolitics of UK immigration detention
Supervisors
Award date
22/03/2022
Teaching
Previously (2017-2023) I taught on several units at the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies, where I also worked as Academic Writing Skills Advisor in Sociology:
-Gender and Migration (final year)
-Gender, Family and Migration (Masters)
-Doing Social Research (first year)
-Sociology in a Global Context (first year)
-Conceptualising the Social (second year)
-Social Identities and Divisions (first year)
I am a Fellow of the University's CREATE Teaching Fellowship Scheme.