Charles Heller is SNF Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Bern where he is leading the “Circumference of Violence research” SNF Starting Grant project (2024-2028) and Director of Research within the Border Forensics investigation agency. He is further affiliated to the University of Bristol as Research Associate. He is a board member of the Mobility & Politics book series and was co-president of the Migreurop network between 2019-2023.
Heller is a transdisciplinary researcher, filmmaker and human rights activist whose work has a long-standing focus on the politics of migration, borders, mediation and the law within and at the borders of Europe. Heller’s research draws on the disciplines of anthropology and geography, but also on arts and architecture-based methodologies, and engages with the study of politics and the law across disciplines.
Heller conducted his PhD thesis at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Its core was constituted by the “Forensic Oceanography” project, which Heller led in collaboration with Lorenzo Pezzani between 2011 and 2021 within the broader Forensic Architecture agency. The Forensic Oceanography project developed new cutting-edge methods to analyse the policies and practices that lead to widespread deaths and violations of migrants’ rights at the EU’s maritime frontier. Through this research Forensic Oceanography has sought to support different nongovernmental actors aiming to contest the EU’s lethal border regime. Heller has contributed in particular to litigation efforts and to launching the WatchTheMed platform, a tool enabling nongovernmental actors to exercise a critical right to look at the EU’s maritime frontier and support migrants during their perilous crossings. Heller’s approach seeks to combine research and practice in transformative and reflexive ways. The knowledge he generates contributes to different forms of nongovernmental practices, and his engagement with these practices allows him in turn to reflect upon their strength, limits and ambivalences in a way that simultaneously contributes to debates both within academia and in the field of nongovernmental practice. Crucial fields of reflection and experimentation for Heller include the critical forensic methodologies aiming to document and represent violent bordering practices, as well as legal strategies seeking accountability for them. Heller further engages in dialogue with humanitarian and human rights organisations, international organisations, as well as policy makers within different institutions and countries.
As part of the Forensic Oceanography project Heller co-authored a number of human rights reports, including "Report on the Left-to-Die Boat" (2012); “Death by Rescue” (2016) ; “Blaming the Rescuers” (2017); "Mare Clausum" (2018) and “The Nivin” (2019), which have contributed to strategic litigation and have had a major impact within the fields of migration and border studies, nongovernmental politics and the public sphere. The videos and other visualisations based on these investigations have been shown in a broad range of academic and activist contexts, and exhibited internationally, including at the HKW in Berlin, the Venice Biennale, the MACBA in Barcelona, the MOMA in New York, the ICA in London and Manifesta 12 in Parlermo. Based on this research, Heller has published and lectured internationally on the transformations of the Euro-Mediterranean border regime, the ambivalent politics of legal and aesthetic practice and nongovernmental politics at sea. His research has been published in several edited volumes and in a number of international journals such as Mobilities, Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, American Behavioral Scientist, Antipode, ACME, New Geographies, Science, Technology, & Human Values Spheres, Global Media and Communication, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly. Heller co-edited with Lorenzo Pezzani and William Walters the book Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion (Duke University Press, 2022).
In the aim of scaling up and consolidating the critical forensic approach developed within the Forensic Oceanography project and adapt its methods to other contexts and modalities of border violence, in 2021 Heller co-founded the Border Forensics research and investigation agency, based in Geneva, for which he acts as Director of Research. Border Forensics develops new methods to investigate the continuum of violence experienced by migrants as they attempt to cross Europe’s disseminated borders, from the increased danger they face as they cross the desert of Niger as a result of outsourced border control to the violent intersection of state borders and racial boundaries they encounter within European cities.
Heller’s current research project, the “Circumference of Violence research” focuses on the transformation and normalization of violence across the external borders of the EU, despite the tireless efforts of nongovernmental actors in exposing and seeking accountability for border violence. The project explores the following overarching question: How do the practices of different actors at the border, as well as political and legal processes across different scales – local, national and European – shape changing modalities of border violence? To answer this question, the project focuses on four case studies located across the circumference of the EU external borders – from Spain to Poland - which it analyses comparatively and relationally through anthropological and geographic approaches and critical forensic investigative methods.
