School of Social and Political Science

Background

Georgia Cole is currently a Chancellor's Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences. Her research focuses on the alternatives that people pursue to formal asylum pathways and on pluralising geographies of refuge to account for diverse sites of protection and respite. She works primarily with Eritrean refugees and migrants in Eritrea, East Africa and the Gulf States, where she is trying to understand the historical and contemporary role of Gulf actors in global systems of displacement and humanitarianism. More broadly, she is interested in exploring how displaced populations access durable solutions and how international and domestic politics affects this, and on displacement dynamics within the Horn of Africa. 

At Edinburgh, she is involved in projects including the Mastercard Foundation-funded blended bridging programme for refugee and host community learners in Uganda, which is being designed and implemented in partnership with the Refugee Law Project and the American University of Beirut. She is also working on a project with the Mixed Migration Centre of the Danish Refugee Council to design a longitudinal survey tool to capture how decision-making evolves among mixed migrants in North and East Africa. 

Prior to this, Georgia was a Research Fellow at the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies at Newnham College, Cambridge, and the Joyce Pearce Junior Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre in Oxford. She completed a DPhil in International Development at the University of Oxford. She is currently the Book Review Editor for Journal of Refugee Studies, and has served on the editorial board for the Journal of Eritrean Studies. Alongside academic publications, she has written for outlets including The Guardian, The Economist, The Independent, The Conversation and Open Democracy.

Her teaching has spanned doctoral, graduate and undergraduate courses, covering a range of courses in geography, development studies, refugee studies, social work and social science research methods. She currently convenes the BSc in Social Work Dissertation Course and co-convenes the graduate Analysing Qualitative Data course in SPS, and is designing a first year course on key Study Skills. 

She is currently accepting PhD students.