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Dr Laura Antona

Dr Laura Antona

Assistant Professor (Education) in Human Geography

Department of Geography and Environment

Email
l.f.antona@lse.ac.uk
Room No
CKK 3.07
Office Hours
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orcid
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1283-2838
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Languages
English
Key Expertise
Migration, violence, domestic labour, home

About me

Laura is an Assistant Professor (Education) in Human Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research is at the intersection of human geography, urban studies/geography, and migration studies, and is particularly concerned with migrants’ experiences of violence, detainment, and forced return in Southeast Asia.

Prior to holding this position, Laura worked as an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment. She holds a PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she was supervised by Professor Hyun Bang Shin and the late Professor Sylvia Chant.

Laura’s doctoral research focused on the experiences of migrant domestic workers who were no longer willing/able to work-for/live-with their employers in Singapore, most often having experienced abuse. Having spent just under a year completing ethnographic fieldwork in a shelter that provides refuge for this population, where she also engaged with arts-based methods, her PhD demonstrated the ways in which the Singaporean migratory regime naturalises and normalises the violence enacted on migrant workers, while also highlighting acts of resistance to this.

 

Expertise Details

Migration; migrant detainment; forced migrant return; violence; domestic labour; home

Publications

Journal Articles

Antona, L. (forthcoming). “Cute face and quiet … but her look don’t match her personality”: Commodifying flesh, shaping labour expectations, and domestic workers’ treatment in Singapore Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Antona, L. (2022). Shelters and clinics: sites where care and violence are mutually constitutive for migrant workers in Singapore. Social & Cultural Geography. Published online ahead of print: DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2022.2107229

Antona, L. (2019). Making hidden spaces visible: Using drawing as a method to illuminate new geographies. AREA, 51(4), 697-705. DOI: 10.1111/area.12526 

Guest Editorial of Journal Special Issues

Krishnan, S. & Antona, L. (forthcoming). “Carceral Domesticities”. Environment and Planning D: Space and Society. 

Book Chapters

Antona, L. (2022). “The New Normal or Same Old? Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore and the Impact of Covid-19”. In: H B Shin, M McKenzie & D Y Oh (eds.) COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-Pandemic World. London: LSE Press.

Selected Public Writing

Antona, L. (2022). What is ‘acceptable’ accommodation? Position paper and report written for the Humanitarian Organisation of Economics.

Antona, L.(2021). Singapore: Stop Sending Migrant Workers Back to Crisis in Myanmar. New Naratif.

Antona, L. (2020). The New Normal or Same Old? The Impacts of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Live-in Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore. Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre Blog, London School of Economics.

Antona, L. (2020). ‘Entering the field and discovering that I was ‘doing’ ethnography’. The Field Research Methods Lab Blog, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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