My research spans critical human geography, human rights, and participatory methods. I work across two registers: applied research commissioned by public bodies and local authorities, and longer-term critical inquiry into how borders, belonging, and systemic harm work in practice. These two modes are dialogic: the policy work stays theoretically grounded; the theory stays grounded in fieldwork and in people. Thematic areas include cultural production, migration and asylum policy, urban belonging, public space. I also work with organisations directly — analysing structures, practices, programmes, and impact in relation to their stated goals, from a critical and ethical standpoint. I am available for independent research, policy consultation, qualitative fieldwork, institutional ethnography, and writing. If you’re working on something that sits at the edges of these questions — in policy, cultural production, or public programming — I’d be glad to talk. Contact me
Applied and Policy Research
Women’s safety in public parks — Northumbria OPCC / Newcastle University (2022)
Commissioned by the Home Office and the Northumbria Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner, this project examined how public parks could be made safer for women, girls, and marginalised communities. As part of a research team led by Professor Rachel Pain at Newcastle University, I proposed and led the psychogeographic ethnography component — place-based fieldwork that captured embodied, situated experiences of unsafety that survey data alone could not surface. The research also drew on focus groups, an online survey, and a participatory stakeholder committee including VAWG organisations, student representatives, and park wardens.
Our findings directly challenged police assumptions: increased surveillance did not improve safety. Intentional human presence and considered lighting intervention did. The results informed the Safer Parks Standard, a policy document adopted by the Northumbria OPCC, with direct implications for infrastructure design across the region.
Methods: psychogeographic ethnography, focus groups, survey design, participatory stakeholder committees, policy brief writing.
Migrant voluntary and community sector — North East England (PhD research, Northumbria University, 2023)
Two years of institutional ethnography with voluntary and community organisations supporting migrants and refugees in Northeast England. The research asked a deceptively simple question: what does “integration” actually ask of people and organisations in practice? What I found was that civil society actors were increasingly co-opted into functions of everyday bordering — managing conditionality, absorbing political pressure, and producing compliance rather than belonging. The organisations themselves often reproduced the exclusions they were designed to address, not through bad faith, but through structural entrapment.
The research has direct relevance for local authorities, funders, and commissioners designing migrant support infrastructure, cultural programmes, and social cohesion policy.
Methods: institutional ethnography, in-depth interviews, participatory action research, workshops.
Community-music and cultural inclusion — Crossings Community, Newcastle (2018–2022)
Alongside my doctoral research, I coordinated operations and conducted embedded research at Crossings Community, a Newcastle-based organisation providing music programmes for asylum seekers and refugees. This work sits at the intersection of cultural policy, sonic geography, and third-sector ethnography — examining how musical spaces create forms of belonging, solidarity, and quiet refusal that formal inclusion programmes cannot replicate.
This work informs my ongoing research into sonic geographies, forthcoming in cultural geographies.
Critical and Theoretical Research
This is a developing strand to which I currently devote a lot of time — sitting at the crossings of critical geography, poetics, somatic practice, and art. It takes seriously what we do not yet have policy language for.
Geopoetics of migration
How do we write about what borders do to people without reproducing the administrative language of the border? This thread runs through my published work in The Geographical Journal (2025) and Fennia (2023) and forthcoming piece in Collateral Journal. It explores regrounding — practices of non-sovereign belonging, like sharing food, tending land, or making music — as both a methodological approach and a form of critical poetics. The question is not only what integration means, but what it forecloses.
Sociosomatics of care infrastructures
Organisations that work with displaced people absorb enormous harm on behalf of the state. This ongoing project examines what that absorption costs — in the bodies of workers, in institutional cultures of exhaustion and shame, in the silencing of resistance. It draws on my own somatic practice, training and certifications, experience of the wellness industry and my research into the nonprofit/third sector, and asks what a sociosomatic analysis of care infrastructure would look like as a policy tool.
Sonic geographies
How migrant organisations produce acoustic spaces — of belonging, solidarity, refusal, and collective mourning. Drawing on fieldwork in Northeast England, New York, and Tunis, this research treats sound as both a metaphor and a method. Forthcoming in cultural geographies.
Methods
I work across a broad methodological range, combining rigorous qualitative methods with participatory and creative approaches:
Psychogeographic ethnography · Institutional ethnography · Participatory action research · Somatic mapping · Semi-structured interviews · Focus groups · Survey design · Policy analysis · Stakeholder engagement · ArcGIS / QGIS · Qualitative data coding (NVivo) · Workshop facilitation · Policy brief writing
Languages
French and Kabyle (native) · English (fluent) · Dutch (advanced) · Arabic (beginner)
Selected publications
Meziant, K. (forthcoming). Architecture of exhaustion: Friction, dignity and the six-square-meter cell. Collateral Journal.
Meziant, K. (under revision). Social and Sonic Harmony Dynamics in the UK’s Migrant Voluntary and Community Sector. cultural geographies.
Meziant, K. (2025). Glitches, geopoetics, and the matter of migration: regrounding beyond citizenship. The Geographical Journal.
Meziant, K. and Clayton, J. (in production). Glimpses beyond citizenship? Challenging citizenship as a frame for the navigation of border regimes. The Geographical Journal (special issue).
Meziant, K. (2023). On reading non-participation as complicated refusal. International Journal of Geography (Fennia).
Pain, R., Ackland, S., Vaughan, C., Meziant, K., & Varna, G. (2022). Safer Parks Standard. Commissioned by the Northumbria OPCC in partnership with Newcastle University.
Meziant, K. (2023). “Unleashing The Beast”: Emergent Resistance in White Charity. In S. M. Hughes (Ed.) Critical Geographies of Resistance Cheltenham: Edward Edgar.
Miller, J., Meziant, K. (2021). A Place More Void by Anna Secor and Paul Kingsbury. Cultural Geographies.
Hafferty, C., Montuori, B., Börner, S., Meziant, K., Stirton, F., Wingfield, T.(2021). Participation for sustainable, resilient, and equitable futures: Where are we heading? Geography Directions. (blog post)
Available for Independent research · Qualitative fieldwork · Policy consultation · Participatory methods · Writing and analysis
Thinking-out-loud and field notes appear on my Substack, moving day.
Kahina Meziant 