Dr Amy Nethery

Amy Nethery is Senior Lecturer in Politics and Policy at Deakin University. She researches the development and impact of asylum policies in Australia and Asia, with a focus on transnational cooperation on border control. An important theme of her work is the analysis of asylum policy according to democratic norms of policymaking. She has a particular interest in immigration detention: its history, evolution, diffusion, legal status, consistency with democratic norms, and human impact. Her article “Australia-Indonesia Cooperation on Asylum Policy” (Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2014) was awarded the 2014 Boyer Prize for the best article published in that journal that year, and was assessed most likely to have lasting impact on policymaking.

On Australian asylum policy, Dr Nethery’s PhD thesis entitled Immigration Detention in Australia won the Isi Leibler Prize in 2011 for the thesis that best advances our knowledge of racism in Australia. An edited volume entitled Immigration Detention: the Migration of a Policy and its Human Impact (with SJ Silverman, Routledge 2015) provides a global survey of the now ubiquitous, yet quite diverse, policy of immigration detention. Dr Nethery was a visiting fellow to the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford in 2013. She teaches the unit Asylum Challenges in Australia and Asia, and supervises research students on this topic.