Sabina Barone

Sabina Barone is a Leverhulme Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Socio Legal Studies.

She completed her PhD in Social Sciences, specialising in Social Anthropology, at University College London, where she was funded by the University College London Graduate Research Studentship. She also holds an MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford and an MA in Anthropology of Public Orientation from the Autónoma University of Madrid.

Her current research project, Coding Belonging: Biometric IDs and diasporic lives between Senegal and Guinea, asks if biometric identification in Africa is crafting inclusive states or introducing new social boundaries. It examines how an emerging, African-led biometric identification system, the West African Economic Community biometric card, mediates the state's power to legitimise or marginalise belonging vis-à-vis long-established diasporic communities between Senegal and Guinea. This project combines socio-legal, anthropological and decolonial approaches to analyse biometric identification policies, their everyday enactment and the lived experiences of diasporic belonging.

More broadly, her research explores experiences of legality, mobility, and belonging that escape or destabilise state-centric categorisation, as well as the everyday construction of, and resistance to, socio-legal exclusion.

Sabina is a former practitioner in development and migration, with 15+ years of experience in more than 20 countries. In particular, she has used participatory methodologies in education projects for marginalised communities in Latin America, provided socio-legal assistance to migrant men and women on the Spanish-Moroccan border, and researched violence against women in contexts of forced mobility and internal displacement in several African countries.