Mary McEwan Memorial Award

Dr. Linn Biörklund is a Research Associate at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University. In September 2025, she will begin a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral research project at the University of Barcelona, Spain. Her research bridges political geography, critical border studies, and transnational feminism to redefine violence, bordering practices, geopolitical economies, and protection along migratory routes and in spaces of waiting. She has extensive experience working with social justice movements and humanitarian NGOs.

Dr. Biörklund’s dissertation, "Moving, Waiting, Searching Across Borders: Gendered Geographies of Violence, Disappearance, and Contestation in Southern Mexico," won the 2023-2024 Mary McEwan Memorial Dissertation Award from the Centre for Feminist Research.

Moving, Waiting, Searching Across Borders: Gendered Geographies of Violence, Disappearance, and Contestation in Southern Mexico centres women displaced by violence from Central America. Their intimate stories and acts of survival and care are foregrounded as they move, wait, and search within social spaces in Mexico. They are mobilized to reconceptualize mainstream thinking about bordering practices as integral components of states’ tactics to control people’s movement only. Delving into migrant and body-territory epistemologies of everyday politics, arts-based contestations, and performative acts, the dissertation reveals and makes present the bodies, spatialities, and knowledges that populate a geopolitically manufactured border and migration “crisis.” Situated at the intersection of transnational feminist approaches, political geography, critical border and refugee studies, and grounded in participatory methodologies with migrant women, feminist and women’s groups, collectives searching for disappeared migrants, and others accompanying border crossers, it makes three significant contributions. First, the methodological approach fosters novel theories about borders and the acts of women crossing them despite their fears. Second, it reconceptualizes the outcomes of bordering practices, exposing the protagonism and spaces of care while underlining the experience of waiting in borderlands. Finally, it reads disappearances as violence toward (feminized) migrant bodies and territories, probing subsequent performative searches by friends and family that defy the salient maternalist and state-centric discourses.