Silvester Schlebrügge
PhD, Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study (from April 2026)
I was recently awarded my PhD in the department of Politics and International Studies and am set to join the Institute of Advanced Study as an Early Career Fellow in April 2026. My doctoral project, titled Back in Line? The Racialised Aesthetics of the UK’s Small Boats Crisis, was supervised by Nick Vaughan-Williams (PAIS) and John Solomos (Sociology) and funded through a PAIS studentship. I also hold an MSc in International Relations Theory (LSE), an MA in Psychosocial Studies (Birkbeck) and a BA in International Relations and Anthropology (Sussex).
Research
My research examines the relationship between politics and aesthetics, with a particular focus on the role of aesthetics in the reproduction and contestation of racialised border regimes. Working from an interdisciplinary perspective, I explore how forms of representation, perception and ‘common sense’ shape the enabling conditions of contemporary border violence. Methodologically, my work combines discourse analysis, legal and policy analysis, as well as the critical reading of visual and material artefacts.
While I am interested in borders in their various national and transnational manifestations, my empirical work so far has focused primarily on the British sea-border and the so-called ‘small boats crisis’ in the English Channel. I approach this site as a space of spectacular and symbolic bordering, where particular notions of crisis and race shape how migration and the border are seen, felt and understood. My research traces how racialised and crisis-inflected aesthetic regimes sustain the border’s legitimacy and affective force, while also considering their points of instability and potential undoing. Current work aims to extend these questions comparatively across other Global North border contexts.