Hosna Shewly is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and the Free University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on peripherality, exploring its intersections with environmental governance, displacement, border crossings, and climate change. By investigating how peripheral regions confront governance challenges and climate-induced vulnerabilities, she highlights the evolving dynamics of sovereignty, gendered mobility, and global environmental transformations.
At UvA, she works at the Department of Anthropology with Erella Grassiani on the politics of forest conservation, indigenous land rights, and arboreal nationalism in the context of climate change in Bangladesh's northeastern and southeastern borderlands. She holds a PhD in Political Geography from Durham University, UK, where she conducted an ethnographic study on the everyday abandonment and de- facto statelessness in the enclaves of India and Bangladesh due to their geopolitical insignificance.
Previously, she worked at Exeter University, Fulda University of Applied Sciences, and VU Amsterdam, focusing on cross-border irregular migration from environmentally stressed regions and natural hazard-related gendered labour migration. She recently concluded two research projects, funded by Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Germany, one on media representations and narratives of climate (im)mobilities; and the role of the digital landscape in shaping irregular mobilities toward Europe.
She has published extensively on various topics, including sovereign abandonment, de facto statelessness, survival mobilities, circular irregular migration, the activism of undocumented borderland people, and intersectional (im)mobilities.