Martin Joormann

About Martin Joormann

Martin Joormann is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Work Science. His research focuses on the experiences of migrants in relation to class, gender, race, and their access to legal and social rights in the welfare state. Joormann’s work is published in internationally recognized outlets, including Manchester University Press; Critical Social Policy; Justice, Power and Resistance; Nordic Journal of Migration Research; and Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees. Following a six-month research stay at the University of Oxford, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, and the completion of his PhD at Lund University’s Sociology of Law Department in 2019, he continued to work transnationally, including research visits in Berlin, Forum Transregionale Studien, and Copenhagen, Centre for European and Comparative Legal Studies (both funded by re:constitution – Fellowship for Young Scholars and Practitioners of Law) and Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (funded by a three-year VR International Postdoc).

Below, he provides a more detailed description of his scholarly profile.

I received my PhD in Sociology of Law from Lund University in 2019. The title of my dissertation (main supervisor: Reza Banakar) is Legitimized Refugees: A Critical Investigation of Legitimacy Claims within the Precedents of Swedish Asylum Law. It explores how the highest legal instance within the Swedish immigration bureaucracy, the Migration Court of Appeal, legitimises decisions that affect the lives of asylum applicants. Based on a critical discourse analysis of the Court’s decisions and informed by interviews I conducted with judges at Sweden’s migration courts, the thesis closely examines asylum cases concerning families with children; class, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality; and the overarching policy of “regulated immigration.”

Since completing my PhD, I have received multiple research grants, including a three-year International Postdoc Grant from VR (the Swedish Research Council). I have contributed to successful externally funded research applications, both as main applicant and co-applicant. In one of these externally funded projects, coordinated by Principal Investigator Teresa Kulawik and titled Gender and Expert Knowledge: A Study of Migration and Integration Policies in Germany, Poland, and Sweden, I am currently (2024–2027) working as a Project Researcher at Södertörn University.

I highly value service to the profession and regularly contribute to academic networks as well as serve as an editor and peer reviewer for scholarly journals. Since 2023, I have been one of the Associate Editors of the Nordic Journal of Migration Research. In my research and writing, I strive to collaborate with colleagues from diverse disciplinary backgrounds based at universities in Sweden and abroad. For instance, the book Refugees and the Violence of Welfare Bureaucracies in Northern Europe, published by Manchester University Press, is one result of such collaboration. I co-edited the volume with Dalia Abdelhady and Nina Gren. Its three primary national contexts are Denmark, Germany, and Sweden, and it also includes chapters by colleagues based in Norway and the UK. Collectively, the book’s twelve chapters contribute to the literature on refugees’ lived experiences of northern welfare bureaucracies.

As another example of collaboration across disciplinary and national boundaries, I co-authored (with Enrico Giansanti and Annika Lindberg) a research article on homelessness and migration in Italy and Sweden. The article, titled “The Status of Homelessness: Access to Housing for Asylum-Seeking Migrants as an Instrument of Migration Control in Italy and Sweden,” was published in Critical Social Policy. In short, collaboration is central to my research practice.

Regarding my teaching experience in higher education, I have taught continuously since beginning my doctoral studies at Lund University in 2014. Over the years, I have worked in a variety of institutions and with diverse student groups at both undergraduate and graduate levels. At Karlstad University, where I worked as a Senior Lecturer in Social Work and Coordinator of the Master’s Programme in Social Work (2023–2025), my responsibilities included course coordination and supervision of bachelor’s and master’s theses.

I have served as a discussant at PhD thesis seminars (“start-up” and “mid-way”) at Lund University’s Department of Sociology of Law as well as other seminars discussing doctoral and postdoctoral work-in-progress at the Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg, as a member of the assessment group for a half-way doctoral seminar at the Department of Social Work, Linköping University, and as co-supervisor of PhD student Kareem Padraig McDonald. In June 2024, McDonald completed his PhD in Human Rights, Society and Multilevel Governance at the University of Padova.

In summary, I have mentoring experience at the undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and postdoctoral levels, and I have taught across various social science disciplines in both Swedish and English at higher education institutions in Sweden, as well as in Denmark (e.g., course coordinator at CIEE, Copenhagen) and Germany (e.g., guest lecturer at Humboldt University, Berlin).