Sophie Bols
Sophie Bols is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Law, Families and Diversity and the Migration Law Research Group at Ghent University. Her PhD research examines how the European Union's legal strategies on border governance produce and reinforce gendered constructions of racialised migrant masculinity.
Taking a socio-legal and intersectional approach, her research analyses the EU's legal framework on border governance and European supranational case law (ECtHR and CJEU) using a critical discourse-analytic approach. It examines how gender intersects with other social markers, such as race, class, and religion, in shaping exclusionary representations of racialised migrant men, and how these representations are both normalised and mobilised through legal language and judicial reasoning. These legal and discursive constructions are then placed in dialogue with the lived experiences of racialised migrant men navigating EU borders, exploring how they negotiate imposed masculinities and how these constructions relate to their experiences and interpretations of masculinity.
Her research contributes to legal scholarship by addressing the relative absence of masculinity as an analytical category in migration law, while offering new insights into the gendered dimensions of EU border governance, and by applying an intersectional lens not only to her research topic but also to the methodological choices within her research.
Sophie holds a Master of Laws (cum laude) from KU Leuven and a Master of Arts in Gender and Diversity Studies (magna cum laude) from Ghent University. She is an editor of the International Encyclopaedia for Migration Law and the Strasbourg Observers Blog. She is affiliated with Ghent University's Human Rights Centre and the Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR), and teaches as a legal coach in the Human Rights and Migration Law Clinic. Her doctoral research is funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).
Keywords:
Migration, Borders, Gender, Masculinity, Intersectionality