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Petra Molnar

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Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in migration and human rights.

A former classical musician, she has been working in migrant justice since 2008, first as a settlement worker and community organizer, and now as a researcher and lawyer. She writes about digital border technologies, immigration detention, health and human rights, gender-based violence, as well as the politics of refugee, immigration, and international law.

Petra has worked all over the world including Jordan, Turkey, Philippines, Kenya, Colombia, Canada, Palestine, and various parts of Europe. She is the co-creator of the Migration and Technology Monitor, a collective of civil society, journalists, academics, and filmmakers interrogating technological experiments on people crossing borders. She is the Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University and a Faculty Associate (and former Fellow) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Petra’s first book, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in The Age of Artificial Intelligence, is published with The New Press in 2024.

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  • "All borderlands have some common strand that binds them together—something in the air or a vibration through the ground which makes you feel somehow insecure, like the ground is less steady underneath your feet. Yet they are also often incredibly beautiful in their deadliness. Borders are sites of natural wonder but also spaces of environmental destruction. The desert is not unlike the sea."

  • "In order to tell global stories of power, violence, innovation, and contestation, I rely on the sometimes-uneasy mix between law and anthropology. It’s a slow and trauma-informed ethnographic methodology, one which requires years of being present in order to begin unraveling the strands of power and privilege, story and memory that makes up the spaces where people’s lives unfold. It is in this slow unpicking that the real impacts of borders come to light.​​"

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