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Claudia María Serrano is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at UBC and a visiting doctoral researcher at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Mexico. Her research examines the effects of US border control on the safety of migrant communities in northern Mexico. Specifically, Claudia employs a critical border perspective to understand and shed light on the lived experiences of people on the move and local service providers, as experts of their own realities. Her previous research explored the impact of the 2018 Salvini Decree on the safety of migrant communities in Italy, as well as the consequences of the criminalization of non-state Search and Rescue (SAR) operations in the Central Mediterranean Sea.
What drew you to studying border control and its effects on migrant safety, and how did this research focus take shape over time?
My family and I immigrated to Canada when I was a child due to war and instability in El Salvador, and I quickly developed an interest in humanitarian, inequality, and poverty relief. Over the years, I participated in various international cooperation projects and later completed a bachelor’s degree in international studies, with a focus on peace and security, at the Université de Montréal. I then decided to pursue a master’s degree in political science, researching migration policies and human rights. During that time, I began looking beyond policies to explore the on-the-ground impacts of migration-control practices on the rights and safety of migrant communities. I first began thinking about my current PhD project with my MA supervisor back in 2020, so this project has been a long time in the making.
Your doctoral research uses a critical border perspective. What does this approach allow you to see or understand that is often missing from mainstream policy debates in political science?
The state is the most important actor within mainstream policy debates in political science. A critical borders perspective allows me to go beyond traditional views of borders as fixed boundaries delimiting sovereign states, exploring the effects of migration control on everyday lives. It allows me to foreground the narratives of targeted migrant communities, shifting the focus away from the state and shedding light on how restrictive migration practices exacerbate inequalities and reinforce long-standing systems of oppression. It also helps me understand how the growing externalization and internalization of border control impact and disrupt lives and trajectories far beyond the ‘line’ separating two nations. This is evident, for example, in liberal democracies’ increased outsourcing of migration control to private or foreign actors and in the rise of immigration enforcement in US cities over the past year.
Your past and current research examine international migration across diverse border contexts. What have you learned from conducting research across countries, and how has this shaped your approach?
Something that has caught my attention and that I would like to explore further is how liberal democracies around the world are increasingly adopting and diffusing illiberal practices to control migration. They are illiberal mainly because they conflict with the values and international humanitarian duties traditionally promoted in the liberal world order to safeguard human rights. This emulation between states creates a pattern where individuals in refugee-like situations are repeatedly denied humanitarian assistance or asylum and must, therefore, move from country to country, sometimes across continents, to find safety. In response, civil society actors continuously step in to uphold the rights and dignity of people in situations of (im)mobility. Exploring how these actors fill this gap in increasingly precarious and illiberal settings has become an important focus of my current research.
What are you currently working on in your role as a Research Assistant at CMS?
I am currently working on a project led by CMS Co-Director Dr. Antje Ellermann, titled Photo Narratives of Citizenship, which is part of CMS’s Narratives of Citizenship research project and the Bridging Divides research program. Earlier last year, project manager Dr. Lisa Brunner and I collaborated with 20 newcomer clients from two BC community organizations. Over the course of April 2025, research participants very generously shared more than 80 participant-generated images and written reflections on how their migration journey has shaped them and how they understand belonging, citizenship, and Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. We then conducted paired interviews with each participant to learn more about their journeys, reflections and photos. You can view the participants’ photos and reflections and stay updated on the project’s next steps here.
As a CMS graduate affiliate and Executive Committee representative, how has being part of the CMS community shaped your research, and what do you see as the value of CMS for graduate students?
The 2021 inauguration of the CMS is one of the main reasons I joined UBC. My expectations have been surpassed time and time again. Being part of the CMS community has allowed me to cultivate a rich network of interdisciplinary migration scholars and experts, including fellow graduate students, within and beyond UBC. I have had multiple opportunities to present my work, collaborate with peers, and learn from global migration researchers. These experiences have all enriched my research in one way or another. For example, many of the talks I have attended or conversations I have had at the CMS have offered key insights into critical borders research and have influenced how I think about certain concepts, as well as the voices and narratives I have decided to emphasize in my work.
What advice would you offer to graduate students interested in critical migration studies?
Some advice I would give to all graduate students is: don’t be afraid to venture off the beaten path. Your thesis or dissertation will have to meet many criteria, but it should also be of interest to you. For critical migration scholars, more specifically, I would tell them to stay updated on what other disciplines are doing. We have so much to learn from one another, and what’s mainstream for one discipline can be innovative for another. Similarly, look beyond the most studied geographical areas in your field and read about how other disciplines have interacted with your research’s population of interest, both ethically and methodologically. Most importantly, engage with other graduate students researching migration, talk to scholars whose work you’re interested in, and don’t be afraid to ask questions.
