Research interests
Extreme Migration, Space, and Refugee Studies, Identity Construction, Ritual, Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism, Crisis, Disaster, Storytelling, Borders, Experimental Methodology
Michael Murphy
My interests lie in extreme forms of migration. I have worked with refugees and displaced migrants, explorers, and, most recently, astronauts. My DPhil project in the Migration Studies program asks how the extreme form of extraterrestrial migration might impact astronaut identities, and what cultures might emerge from long-term habitation in space stations and lunar bases. This simultaneously considers extraterrestrial communities as unique sites of cosmopolitan creation outside of the global sphere, and questions how migration studies as a field might adapt to human migration beyond Earth.