Sine Plambech

We are happy to welcome Sine Plambech as Research Fellow at Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies. Dr. Sine Plambech is Senior Researcher at DIIS – the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. She is Associated Lecturer at University of Copenhagen and former Visiting Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University and at Yale University’s Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Dr Plambech is an anthropologist and scholar of international migration in particular engaged in questions of critical migration and refugee studies, women’s migration, trafficking, border politics, transnational feminism, migrant sex work, marriage migration, labor migration, and the representations of these themes through visual anthropology and film making.  

At Yale, Plambech is developing a research program with Professor Ana Ramos-Zayas on migration, gender and climate change in a global perspective as well as developing new opportunities for collaboration between Yale and the Danish Institute for International Studies.

She has over the past fifteen years continuously carried out fieldwork and filmed in migrant communities, border areas, red light districts, and along migrant routes from and in Southern Nigeria, North East Thailand, Sicily and Northern Europe. Plambech’s current research is on women arriving as undocumented migrants from and through Africa to Europe across the Mediterranean. She in particular engages with the contemporary ‘European migration crisis’ in relation to the urgent issue of women as refugees and migrants.

Plambech is an award-winning filmmaker merging her academic work with documentary film making. Based on her research she is behind six award-winning films among them Heartbound (2018) for which she was awarded the American Anthropological Association’s for Best Feature and the British Royal Anthropological Institute’s Richard Werbner Award. Her films seek to pose counter-narratives to dominant portrayals of migration, family, borders and women as migrants. Her articles have been published in Social Politics, Feminist Economics, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and The Anti-Trafficking Review.

She is engaged with activist NGOs on migrants and sex worker rights and often participates in public debates on migration, the European migration crisis and human trafficking. Dr. Plambech writes for Open Democracy, Africa is a Country, Refugees Deeply and her work is, among other places, displayed by the New Yorker, BBC, Le Monde and Deutsche Welle.

Like most other faculty Dr. Plambech will work remotely but students working within her fields are most welcome to contact her at spl@diis.dk or sine.plambech@yale.edu.