Welcome to my personal website!
I’m Simon Noori (né Simon Sontowski) and I work as senior researcher (Oberassistent) in Economic Geography at the Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland. I study various practices, materialities and rationalities of governing cross-border movements, with a special focus on the European border regime. This work comprises my PhD research, in which I traced the socio-material emergence of the European Smart Borders Package for biometric border control, and further work on Europe’s contested border zones, such as the current struggles for freedom of movement in the Mediterranean Sea and the attempts to restabilize the European border regime after its breakdown in 2015.
I’m co-editor of movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies and recently co-edited the book Grenzregime III on the ramifications of the long summer of migration in 2015. In late 2017, I published the paper Speed, timing and duration: contested temporalities, techno-political controversies and the emergence of the EU’s smart border in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. In July 2018, I successfully defended my PhD dissertation, «The Birth of the Temporal Border. Tracing the Contested Emergence of the EU’s Smart Borders Package».
Within the Economic Geography unit, I have taught Bachelor courses i.a. on heterodox economics, urban neoliberalism and the right to the city, and on alternative economies. Currently, I’m teaching a course on the contested development of the European migration and border regime.
On this website, you will find an overview on my current research projects, publications and conferences lists, media articles as well as information on my activities beyond academia. Please feel free to contact me in case of any further questions.
Simon Noori 