Sofi Jansson-Keshavarz

Sofi Jansson-Keshavarz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Migration and Integration Research (CMIR) at the Stockholm School of Economics, specializing in how welfare policy and practice shape migration law, legal precarity, and internal border control. She holds a Ph.D. in Welfare Law from Linköping University (2026).

Her doctoral research analyzed Sweden’s turn toward temporary refugee protection after 2016, introducing the concept of temporary legality – a condition of prolonged uncertainty shaped by legal conditionality and the lingering threat of deportation. The thesis shows how migration law is shaped through local welfare policy and practice, where spatial, temporal, and racial dynamics intersect, and how welfare‑embedded border control contributes to the dismantling of the right to asylum.

Her work has been published internationally in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Migration and Society, Critical Social Policy, and the European Journal of Social Work. She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender in 2023. Before entering academia, she worked outside the university sector with municipal reception of children seeking asylum “unaccompanied” and has been active in asylum rights networks since 2011.

At SSE, her postdoctoral project examines the expanding use of language requirements and testing as instruments of internal border control and their racialized and exclusionary effects in Sweden.

Selection of publications

Jansson-Keshavarz, S. (2026). Temporary legality: Regulating asylum through housing and education in the Swedish welfare state. Linköping University, Department of Culture and Society, Division of Social Work. https://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:2022286/FULLTEXT01.pdf