Angela Smith

Angela Smith is a political geographer of migration, bordering, and mobility systems. Her research examines how infrastructures, legal regimes, and elemental environments shape practices of governance, movement, and resistance, with particular attention to how regimes of circulation—from civil aviation to security infrastructures—organise territorial control and political authority. Working across infrastructure studies, critical theory, and environmental humanities, she explores the material and affective dimensions of migration, territoriality and place-based inequities. Angela also draws on psychoanalytic theory to examine the unconscious investments and attachments that underpin both repressive state practices and liberatory projects of solidarity and struggle. Angela is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW, where she teaches human geography, international studies, and environmental humanities. She previously held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Centre for Western Sydney at Western Sydney University. Her ongoing place-based research in Western Sydney examines how migration, infrastructure and governance intersect to produce spatial, racial and class inequities. For this work, Angela was awarded a 2024 James Martin Institute Policy Challenge Grant. Angela was a 2024 Visiting Fellow at NCCR – On the Move in Switzerland and a 2019 Fellow of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at The New School for Social Research in New York. Angela holds a Masters in Migration Studies from the American University in Cairo and a PhD from the Faculty of Law and Justice at UNSW. Angela brings to her scholarship more than a decade of experience working with diverse communities and international organisations. She has particular expertise in the Middle East and North Africa region, where she has worked with the Centre for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo, the North Africa Mixed Migration Task Force, Transparency International, UNHCR, IOM, UNICEF, World Social Forum, and Forensic Architecture research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London. human migration, geography, borders, political theory, aviation, environmental humanities, Political geography, Migration, Critical theory, Visual cultures, History of empires, imperialism and colonialism, Middle Eastern and North African history, Social geography