Belinda Rawson

Year of Entry: 2023

Research: Contradiction, Compromise and Contestation in UK Asylum Appeals

Supervisor(s): Ana Aliverti, Henrique Carvalho & Anastasia Chamberlen

Bio

Belinda is an admitted solicitor in Australia and has worked at the University of Warwick’s School of Law since 2019 as an Associate Tutor and academic researcher. During this time, she has been involved in numerous socio-legal projects related to decolonisation, human rights, migration, global health, and criminal law. She completed her Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Arts (Ancient History) degrees at the University of New England in Australia (2018, First Class Honours).

Since September 2023, Belinda has been a PhD researcher on the Vulnerable State project. Her PhD examines the governance of asylum in the UK through socio-legal, refugee law, and critical state theory perspectives, with particular interests in law and emotion, human rights, and resistance. It develops the original conceptual framework of the Neurotic Frontier to explain how contradiction is managed within asylum adjudication, offering a novel account of the institutional and emotional dynamics through which institutional authority and exclusion are both reproduced and contested.

Research Publications

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Rawson, B. (2026) The Subversive Bureaucrat: Strange Activism and Camusian Limits of Institutional Revolt, Journal of Resistance Studies, Special Issue on Strange Activism (forthcoming).

Rawson, B. (2026) Health data justice, epistemological delinking and vernacularisation: reclaiming knowledge, rights and representation, International Journal of Law In Context, Special Issue on Regulating Digital Health in the Global South: Critical and Decolonial Approaches, 22(1), 75–89.

Sekalala, S., Rawson, B., & Andanda, P. (2025) A socio-legal critique of the commercialization of digital health in Sub-Saharan Africa, Policy Studies, 47(2), 1–21.

Carvalho, H., Foreman, S., Tawfic, S., Aliverti, A., Chamberlen, A., & Rawson, B. (2025) Modern Slavery and the Punitive–Humanitarian Complex, The British Journal of Criminology, 65(1), 93–109.

Sekalala, S. & Rawson, B. (2023) Manufacturing Inequality: Examining the Racial-Capitalist Logics behind Global Pandemic Vaccine Production, AfronomicsLaw.

Sekalala, S. & Rawson, B. (2022) The role of civil society in mobilizing human rights struggles for essential medicines: a critique from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19, Health and Human Rights, 24(2), 177–189.

Smith, M.J., Forman, L., Parker, M., Perehudoff, K., Rawson, B., & Sekalala, S. (2021) Should COVID-19 Vaccines Authorized for Emergency Use Be Considered “Essential” Medicines?, Health and Human Rights, 23(1), 45–150.

Sekalala, S., Perehudoff, K., Parker, M., Forman, L., Rawson, B., & Smith, M. (2021) An intersectional human rights approach to prioritising access to COVID-19 vaccine, BMJ Global Health, 6(2).

Book Reviews

Rawson, B. (2026) Book Review: Ambivalent Humanitarianism and Migration Control (Erika Herrera Rosales, 2025, Routledge), International Migration Review.

Blogs

Davis, M., Sekalala, S., Serra, F., Rawson, B., Pugh-Jones, M., & Celi, L.A. (2024) Seven proposals for the Model Law on Health Data Governance, PLOS Global Public Health, 28 May.

Rawson, B. (2022) Cuba combats ‘vaccine apartheid’ to protect countries in the Global South against Covid-19, Lacuna Magazine, 19 July.

Sekalala, S. & Rawson, B. (2020) Navigating the Paradoxes of Selective COVID-19 Border Closures, Border Criminologies (University of Oxford), 8 July.

Sekalala, S. & Rawson, B. (2020) Indigenous Rights are Human Rights Too, Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 4 June.

Podcasts

Rawson, B. (2022) A Shot In The Dark: A Covid-19 Vaccines Podcast, Lacuna Magazine.

This three-part podcast series explores COVID-19 vaccine prioritisation, how we can shape more equitable pandemic responses in future, as well as the ways in which some population groups, such as ethnic minorities, asylum seekers, refugees, undocumented migrants, and young people, have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 vaccine responses.

Conference Presentations

The Neurotic Frontier: Contradiction, Compromise and Contestation in UK Asylum Appeals, Critical Realism Philosophy Group, University of Warwick (24 April 2026)

Beyond Dysfunction: Structural Contradiction in UK Asylum Adjudication, Warwick Law PGR Conference, University of Warwick, UK (26 February 2026)

Structural and Epistemic Dimensions of Power and Resistance in Digital Health, Health Apps International Conference, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (18-19 February 2026)

Bureaucratic Subversion as Emancipatory Praxis: A Case Study of Home Office Presenting Officers, Border Criminologies Annual Workshop: Border Resistance and Utopian Futures, University of Cambridge, UK (18-19 September 2025)

Neurotic Frontiers and their Contestations: A Case Study of UK Border Bureaucrats, Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, The American College of Greece, Athens, Greece (3-6 September 2025)

Psychoanalysis, Emotion, and Resistance in the UK Border Regime, Frontiers Before Borders: Perceptions of Boundaries, Territory and Space in the Past and Present, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (11-12 July 2025)

Neurotic Frontiers and their Contestations: The Case of UK Asylum, Migration and Societal Change Conference 2025, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands (19-20 June 2025)

Colonial Vicissitudes and Crime: Asylum Systems in Australia and Britain, Criminal Justice Centre Conference: Critical Provocations in Criminal Justice, University of Warwick, UK (9 May 2025)

Emotions, Contestation and Emancipation: A Case Study of Border Bureaucrats, The Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Annual Conference, University of Liverpool, UK (15-17 April 2025)

Emotions in Immigration and Asylum Tribunals: An Aristotelian Typology, Critical Realism Philosophy Group, University of Warwick, UK (31 January 2025)

The Imperial Boomerang Effect: Australia and Britain's Symbiotic and Parasitic Relationship on Asylum Policy, International Conference on Postcolonial Studies: Trajectories and Transitions of (Post)Colonialism, University of Malta, Valletta, Malta (30 August 2024)

Emotions and Subversion: Conceptualising Street-Level Bureaucrats as ‘Tempered Radicals’, Warwick Law School Conference, University of Warwick, UK (27 June 2024)

Complicating Perceptions of the Modern Bureaucrat, Criminal Justice Centre PhD Conference, University of Warwick, UK (2 May 2024)

Subversion from Within: An Exploration of Tempered Radicalism in UK Asylum Tribunals, European Group: Independence, Abolition and Resistance Conference, Cardiff, Wales, UK (4 April 2024)

UK Asylum in Context: Precursors to Resistance, Warwick Law PGR Conference, University of Warwick, UK (28 February 2024)

From Endorsement to Implementation of Human Rights: The Role of NGOs in Transforming the Health Data Governance Landscape, Digital Health Regulatory and Policy Perspectives Workshop, University of Warwick, UK (4 September 2023)

Teaching