Sarah Philipson Isaac

Sarah Philipson Isaac is a sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Migration and Integration Research (CMIR). She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Gothenburg, where she defended her dissertation, Temporal Dispossession: The Politics of Asylum and the Remaking of Racial Capitalism in and Beyond the Borders of the Swedish Welfare State, in May 2024.

Through ethnographic engagements with people seeking asylum in Sweden, her doctoral research offers an analysis of the transformations in Swedish asylum legislation post-2015. The thesis examines how dispossession operates in and through the border regime, specifically through its temporal configurations, and how the latter is weaponised to dispossess people of their life chances. It contributes to critical scholarship on the political economy of borders, with a focus on the Nordic context, examining the operation of racial capitalism through the welfare state, where labour market exploitation is exacerbated by the precarity produced through its migration bureaucracies.

In her current role at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), Dr. Philipson Isaac collaborates with Associate Professor Lin Lerpold and Professor Örjan Sjöberg on research into the value chains of labor market exploitation alongside more repressive migration policies, with a focus on the construction sector. 

Selection of publications

Philipson Isaac, S. (2025). The expanding carceral geography of Sweden and counter-politics of care, South Atlantic Quarterly, 124(1). DOI: 10.1215/00382876-11557881

Philipson Isaac, S. (2025). Unpacking state production of temporal dispossession: The intersections of labour, asylum and informalisation in Sweden. Critical Sociology, 51(1). DOI: 10.1177/08969205241242098

Philipson Isaac, S. (2024). Temporal Dispossession: The politics of asylum and the remaking of racial capitalism in and beyond the borders of the Swedish welfare state. Diss. University of Gothenburg, 2024. Gothenburg. ISBN: 978-91-87876-63-9

Philipson Isaac, S. (2022). Temporal dispossession through migration bureaucracy: On waiting within the asylum process in Sweden. European Journal of Social Work, 25(6), 945–956. DOI: 10.1080/13691457.2022.2077317