The Global Migration Centre is delighted to announce that the 2025 Global Migration Award has been awarded to Claire Elizabeth Eastwood for her outstanding Master’s thesis in Anthropology and Sociology, entitled: The Intelligible Asylum Seeker: Creating an Affectively Credible Protagonist.

The Global Migration Award, created in 2013, promotes innovative and high-quality research on global migration. Each year, it rewards one Master’s student at the Graduate Institute for an exceptional thesis addressing issues such as mobility, forced or voluntary migration, displacement, citizenship, and diaspora. The award is granted through a competitive peer-review process and is open to all Master’s students regardless of specialization.

About the winning thesis

Eastwood’s thesis challenges conventional understandings of credibility in asylum proceedings. While asylum judges often frame credibility as a matter of consistency, her research reveals its affective dimensions.

Through an eight-week ethnography at a U.S. legal aid NGO, she observed how lawyers construct what she terms affective credibility, transforming asylum seekers into coherent and trustworthy protagonists whose stories judges can recognize and relate to. By presenting applicants as intelligible characters in linear narratives, lawyers invite judges to enter the story as protagonists themselves, positioned to deliver a “happy ending” through a positive asylum decision.

This work not only enriches the anthropology of law and migration but also sheds light on the power of narrative, emotion, and perception in life-changing legal processes.

About the Global Migration Award

Since its creation in 2013, the Global Migration Award has highlighted outstanding scholarship on migration, displacement, and citizenship. By recognizing exceptional research at the Master’s level, the award underscores the Graduate Institute’s commitment to advancing critical knowledge and supporting new generations of migration scholars.

Congratulations to Claire Elizabeth Eastwood for her remarkable contribution to migration studies and for being this year’s Global Migration Award laureate.