Sofi Jansson-Keshavarz

Sofi Jansson-Keshavarz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Migration and Integration Research (CMIR), working at the intersection of migration law, welfare policy and border studies. She holds a PhD in Welfare Law from Linköping University (2026).

Her doctoral research analysed Sweden’s turn toward temporary refugee protection after 2016, introducing the concept of temporary legality – a condition of prolonged uncertainty shaped by legal conditionality and the persistent threat of deportation. The thesis shows how migration law is shaped through local welfare policy and practice, where spatial, temporal, and racial dynamics intersect, and how welfare‑embedded border control contributes to the dismantling of the right to asylum.

At SSE, her postdoctoral project develops temporary legality as a mode of governance to explore how conditionality, re-evaluation, and revocability increasingly shape the terms of citizenship.

She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender in 2023. Before entering academia, she worked outside the university sector with municipal reception of children seeking asylum “unaccompanied” and has been active in asylum rights networks since 2011.

Selection of publications

Jansson-Keshavarz, S. (Forthcoming). Raciolinguistic borders: Deportable subjects, language requirements and the neoliberal education system in Sweden. Migration and Society.

Jansson-Keshavarz, S. (2026). Temporary legality: Regulating asylum through housing and education in the Swedish welfare state. Linköping University, Department of Culture and Society, Division of Social Work. 

https://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:2022286/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Jansson-Keshavarz, S. (2025). Border times: welfare workers navigating the temporal intersections of migration law and the education system. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2514148

Jansson-Keshavarz, S., Nordling, V., Krifors, K. (2024). Housing and temporary legality: The evictability and settlement of refugees in Swedish municipalities. Critical Social Policy 45(1), 115-137. https://doi.org/10.1177/02610183241240379

Jansson-Keshavarz, S., Nordling, V. (2022). Waiting for Housing: Municipal Practices of Mobility Control. European Journal of Social Work, 25(6), 969–981.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13691457.2022.2040439