DrIsabel Arce Zelada

Dr Isabel Arce Zelada is a European Research Council (ERC) Postdoctoral Fellow working on the project "Solidarity, Sovereignty, and Sanctuary on the Seas. A Global History of Boat Refugees since the 1940s (SOS)" focusing specifically on Cuban and Haitian refugees in the 1980s and 90s. Their first book "Art, Asylum and Alienhood: Narrative Inequality in the UK Asylum Process" is forthcoming with Routledge for their Studies in Migration and Diaspora series.

Isabel is a social anthropologist, having completed their PhD at the University of Hull, looking at the narrative inequality within the UK asylum system and the experiences of people going through it. The PhD project founded the Who We Are art collective (2022-2024) that exhibited the artworks created during and after the project in three separate exhibitions. Their MRes and MA were both conducted at the University of Aberdeen and dealt with the political discourse in Cuba (2018) and the UK asylum appeal hearings  (2019). 

Interested in in political and legal discourse, anti-colonial methodology, alienhood, and critical border studies.