Bio

 Austin Crane received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Washington in 2021. Prior to this, he completed his M.A. in geography at the University of Kentucky and his B.A. in economics and Russian from the South Carolina Honors College at USC. Dr. Crane joined the University of South Carolina as Faculty Instructor in 2022. He is also Assistant Director for Undergraduate Studies in the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies, Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Geography, and Co-Coordinator of the USC Migration Lab.  

Dr. Crane’s research examines the interconnected spaces and politics of migration, borders, humanitarianism, development, human rights, and asylum. As a political geographer, his research analyzes how humanitarianism intersects with the ways that Western states attempt to manage migration today — particularly through migrant return policies and asylum processes. His current research program focuses on three related areas: 

1. The intertwined politics of humanitarian assistance and migrant return. Dr. Crane conducted his dissertation research with a range of international, state, and local migration organizations across Europe to study emerging intersections between humanitarianism and security in European migration policy. Through focusing on Assisted Voluntary Return programs, this research investigates how practitioners at humanitarian organizations navigate the conflicted politics of care, asylum, and migrant return. He is now developing a longitudinal study on “humanitarian geographies of migrant return,” to analyze how humanitarian/voluntary return policies are intertwined with changing geographies of asylum across Europe. 
   
   
2. Asylum adjudication, human rights, and spatial practices of bordering and law. A collaborative research project with Dr. Malene Jacobsen (Newcastle University, UK) analyzes how state-produced human rights reports are enrolled as forms of evidence in asylum courts across the United States, United Kingdom, and Denmark. This project, entitled “Country-of-Origin (COI) Reports: A Transnational Geography of Asylum Adjudication,” draws insights from feminist geopolitics, socio-legal studies, and critical refugee studies to explore how decisions made about forced migrants in national asylum systems are interlinked through the use and transnational circulation of COI reports. 
   
   
3. Development, inequality, and migration/border management. Dr. Crane’s research has also analyzed how the European Union’s “neighborhood” development policies facilitated the externalization of migration and border management to Ukraine. He maintains ongoing interests in how states and international organizations manage migration and borders in a world of inequality. 

This research has been published in a range of journals, including Antipode, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Geoforum, and Political Geography. 

At USC, Dr. Crane enjoys teaching interdisciplinary courses on global migration, human rights, international development and global inequality, qualitative research and methods, intro to global studies, and social/ethical challenges of technology. Additionally, he maintains ongoing engagements with the South Carolina Geographic Alliance around curriculum and instructional materials for geography education, editing the forthcoming Atlas of South Carolina, 3rd Edition (University of South Carolina Press).