Dr Lara Momesso

They bridge multiple fields, including gender studies, political science, international relations and anthropology and address themes related to international migration, citizenship, identity and belonging, sovereignty, inequality and resistance, with a regional focus on East Asia. 

Lara's research explores how marginalised and racialised groups, including economic migrants, asylum seekers, women, youth, and ageing populations, navigate the shifting conditions produced by global capitalism, authoritarianism, migration regimes, and nation-state boundaries. These inquiries are informed by and contribute to critical debates around social justice, intersectionality, decoloniality, affect and emotions in politics, citizenship and belonging, and bordering practices.

She has an extensive track record in these areas. Her monograph, titled Cross-Border Intimacies: Affect and Emotions in Marriage Migration between China and Taiwan (published by the University of Manchester Press in 2025), offers a critical intervention in global politics by foregrounding the emotional and affective dimensions of cross-border migration. Through ethnographic inquiry, it examines a phenomenon that is both deeply personal and politically charged. Moving away from approaches that emphasise rational choice and institutional governance, the book reveals how emotions and affect shape not only migrants’ intimate decisions, experiences of integration, identity and belonging, but also the ways in which states and societies perceive and manage transnational marriages. Through this approach, the study challenges conventional understandings of migration as a purely strategic or economic process, and instead positions emotional life as a site of geopolitical significance, where power, inequality, and national imaginaries are both reproduced and contested.

She also co-edited the volume Refugees and Asylum Seekers in East Asia: Perspectives from Japan and Taiwan, which examines refugee acceptance and protection as a multilayered process involving states, civil society, media, publics, and refugees themselves. By advancing a human security framework over dominant national security narratives, the collection challenges exclusionary approaches to migration governance. This work engages critically with how security, sovereignty, and refugee integration and protection are constructed and contested in East Asia, offering both empirical depth and theoretical insight. Overall, my outputs contribute to key thematic areas revolving around power, inequality, affective politics, resistance, identity, and the transformation of sovereignty in an increasingly fragmented global order.

Other areas of interest revolve around identity and self-representation of Chinese communities in Britain, alternative education and migrant elites in China, and the role of social media in shaping democracy in Asian societies.

Lara is Associate Research Fellow of the Institute for Area and Migration Studies at the University of Central Lancashire and Affiliated Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Asia Pacific. At the University of Central Lancashire, she founded and Co-Directed the Northern Institute of Taiwan Studies (2018-2025) and the Centre for Migration, Diaspora and Exile (2019-2025). She also is Research Associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies at SOAS (the University of London, UK) and Associate Fellow at the European Research Centre of Contemporary Taiwan (University of Tuebingen, Germany). Lara is Editor-in-Chief of Asia Pacific Viewpoint, a peer reviewed journal in area studies, development studies, geography and allied disciplines.

Lara also is the host of two podcast series: Voices of Lancashire (published by Saspod), exploring the experiences of migrants in Northern England, and Taiwan on Air (published by New Books Network), exploring issues linked to Taiwanese culture, society and politics.

Lara is available for PhD supervision and external examinations, interviews, as well as advisory and consultancy services on contemporary Asian societies and cultures. She can offer expertise on themes pertaining to the broader Asia Pacific region and, more specifically, Taiwan, China, and Japan, and on issues related to migration, gender, family youth, identity, political participation, integration, resistance, education, cross-Strait relations, and Asian communities in Britain and Europe. In her work, she privileges qualitative methodologies, informed by feminist principles of intersectionality, reflexivity, and social justice, and she can offer expertise on ethnographic methods, participatory approaches, and action research.