Menah Raven-Ellison
PhD student

Research interests:
My research interests include: geographies of imprisonment, confinement and detention; health geographies; mental health; critical geographies of home; feminist geographies; narrative research.

PhD Research:
Beyond detention: Women, home and mental wellbeing
My research contributes to the emerging geographic research on detention, imprisonment, and confinement. It draws simultaneously upon critical geographies of home, identity and belonging while speaking to health geographies literature. The study has two key strands. First and foremost it seeks the narratives of migrant women who have been detained in UK Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs). This investigation centres upon subjective accounts of ‘home’ post-detention, and how these real and imagined geographies of home are imbricated in personal management of mental wellbeing. The second strand provides a wider context for this investigation, situating it within discourses of transnationality, citizenship, gendered identities, security and immigration enforcement. This is particularised through temporal and spatial scales. Temporally, the repercussions of detention are explored not only through enduring retrospective accounts but through the inherent indeterminacy and exceptionality of detention and the imposing ‘spectre’ of future confinement. Spatially, the study seeks a feminist geopolitical perspective of how the geographies of detention may extend beyond institutional boundaries to the home as an equally problematic space. In this context the interplay with mental wellbeing may remain ambiguous, acting potentially as a site of resistance or indeed one of continued confinement and oppression.

Presentations:

• “Beyond detention: Women, home and mental health”. Presented at the Queen Mary PhD Conference, June 14^th 2011.
• “Beyond detention: Women, home and mental health”. Presented at RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, London, August 31^st – September 2^nd 2011.

Clinical experience:
I am also a Senior Occupational Therapist with experience of working with older adults, disabled children and acute inpatient mental health settings. Currently I also work part time for a Community Mental Health Team in South West London.

PhD Supervisors:
Professor Isabel Dyck
Dr. Beth Greenhough

Research Groups:
Women and Geography Study Group of the RGS-IBG

PhD Funding:
ESRC