Professor Heaven Crawley joined the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations (CTPSR) at Coventry University in September 2014 from where she leads the UKRI GCRF South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub (MIDEQ). Educated at the Universities of Sussex (1989-1994) and Oxford (1995-1999), Heaven has more than 25 years' experience of undertaking research on international migration in a wide range of institutional settings (government, voluntary sector, national and international organisations, academia). She was previously head of asylum and migration research at the UK Home Office (2000-2), Associate Director at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) (2002-4) and managed an international research consultancy (2004-6) before returning to academia to set up the Centre for Migration Policy Research at Swansea University (2006-14).
Heaven’s research is underpinned by concerns about the inequalities with which international migration is often (but not always) associated: global, local and social inequalities that limit human potential and shape decisions to migrate; inequalities in opportunities to move safely, often linked to gender, ethnicity or age; inequalities in the opportunities to secure access to protection, work and rights; inequalities in the representation of concerns and interests around migration which often decontextualise migration from broader processes of social, political and economic change; inequalities in the construction of knowledge around migration processes and outcomes, in particular the marginalisation of migrants and scholars in the Global South in migration debates and policy analysis. She is particularly interested in better understanding the relationships between migration and inequality in the context of the Global South.