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Maya Goodfellow is a writer and academic, specialising in the relationships between race, bordering and capitalism. She is currently Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at SPERI, the University of Sheffield, where she is conducting a research project exploring these themes. Through this work Maya is particularly concerned with the politics of 'the centre' and the material elements of racism.
Her first book Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats was published with Verso in 2020 and was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews, it charts the history of the UK's immigration policy and rhetoric, examining the racialised nature of both, and analyses and challenges the anti-immigration arguments that have been widely accepted in mainstream UK politics. A new edition of the book was published in the Autumn of 2020, which includes a chapter analysing the impact of immigration enforcement during a global pandemic.
Maya received her PhD from SOAS, University of London in 2019. Her doctoral thesis explored race and processes of racialisation in British international development discourse about India between 1997-2017. The findings of this research will form some of her future work. At SOAS she also taught in the departments of Politics and International Studies and Development Studies.
Maya has written for The Guardian, New Statesman and The New York Times, among others, and regularly appears on channels such as the BBC and Sky News.
