Dr Hannah Morgan

Hannah is a Career Development Research Fellow at Jesus College and an Honorary Research Associate at the School of Geography and the Environment. Her research interests sit at the intersection between the everyday geopolitics of state power, affectual (non)relations, and digital mediation.

Hannah received her PhD from Durham University. Her research explored how smartphones have become key technological mediators of affective state power: specifically, how the UK government’s Hostile Environment is felt and encountered in everyday digital life. The thesis is a project of affective ambiguity – tracing everyday digital mediations of the Hostile Environment through experiences of exhaustion and suspension, but equally through hopefulness and care(ing).

Hannah's current CDRF research attempts to further understand how exhaustion gets produced and contested: both for asylum seekers themselves, and those involved in upholding a self-claimed ‘exhausting’ state (from policy makers, call centre workers, housing agencies, to charity volunteers). She aims to complicate (1) what is exhausting, (2) who is exhausting, (3) and where does exhaustion take us in critical theory?

Alongside this new research, she is working on a book project based on the politics of ambiguous affects. With this project, she builds upon a critical conversations in geography of why certain kinds of affect(s) get attached to or detached from the asylum seeking subject: from more ‘negative’ affects like exhaustion and fear, to more ‘affirmative’ relations such as hope and joy –  and those that sit in the grey, inbetween like detachment and indifference.

Hannah teaches Human Geography at Jesus College and is involved in the following teaching:

• Prelims: Human Geography; Geographical Controversies; Geographical Techniques.
• Final Honours School (FHS): Space, Place and Society; Environmental Geography; Geographical Thought; Dissertation Supervision.
• Postgraduate College Supervision

• Morgan, H. (2026: in production) Staying with and inbetween hostility: non-digital-centric ethnography in a digitally mediated world. Social & Cultural Geography.
• Morgan, H. (2025) (Re)Mediating the Hostile Environment: Everyday Digital Assemblages of Care within Asylum Systems. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 43(6): 1-18.
• Morgan, H. (2024) Between Hope and Hostility. The Affirmative Biopolitics of Everyday Smartphone Geographies. Political Geography, 114: 1-11.
• Morgan, H. (2024) Digitally dis/connected: How smartphones are changing the everyday experience of claiming asylum in the UK. Geography Directions.
• Morgan, H. (2024) Everyday digital dis/connection: Locating slow violence in (non)encounters with the UK asylum state. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 00, 1–16.
• Morgan, H. (2023) Living digitally like a migrant: Everyday smartphone practices and the (Re)mediation of hostile state-affects. Progress in Human Geography, 47(3): 409-426.