Nina Perkowski (DE) is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Violence and Security Research at the University of Hamburg. She has been a Young Academy Fellow of the Academy of Sciences in Hamburg since November 2023, and since January 2025 serves as Co-Speaker of the Academy’s project group “Futures, Utopias and Dystopias”. Her research examines security in an era of multiple crisis narratives, focusing on borders as sites of (in)security production, as well as on struggles over urban security practices. She employs a wide range of mostly qualitative methods to analyse how security practices emerge through intersections of race, class, gender, and dis/ability, and explores how communities develop alternative security concepts through radical re-imagination and utopian experimentation.
She is author of “Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Security: The Case of Frontex” (Routledge, 2021) and co-author of “Reclaiming Migration: Testimonies Beyond Crisis” (Manchester University Press, 2021). Her research has been published in leading journals including Journal of Common Market Studies, Security Dialogue, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
From 2019-2021, she worked as a Researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH) in Hamburg, and previously as a Lecturer at the Chair for Criminology at the University of Hamburg (2017-2019), where she among others coordinated the Erasmus Mundus Doctorate in Cultural and Global Criminology. Her experience also includes working as Research Coordinator of the Mediterranean Migration Research Programme (2016-2017) and Research Fellow on the ESRC project “Crossing the Mediterranean Sea by Boat” (2015-2017), led by Vicki Squire at the University of Warwick.
Nina Perkowski holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Edinburgh, an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from Oxford University as well as a BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences from University College Maastricht, with additional studies at UC Berkeley.