Kelly Soderstrom

Dr. Kelly Soderstrom serves as a Lecturer in Business Management and Research Fellow, and member of the Public Service Research Group in the School of Business at UNSW Canberra, University of New South Wales. She earned her PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Melbourne in 2022, with a thesis titled 'Refugees, Responsibility, and Crisis: An Analysis of the German Government's Response to the 2015-2016 Asylum Governance Crisis.' Her earlier qualifications include an MSc with Distinction in International and European Politics from the University of Edinburgh and a BA cum laude in Political Science and International Relations from Carleton College. Soderstrom's research investigates social, political, legal, and economic borders, analyzing how organizations and states construct boundaries to achieve policy aims. Her work spans bordering practices from bureaucratic resource access to international asylum regimes, with current projects examining public sector managers' negotiation of merit boundaries in human resource practices and the role of sports-based NGOs as brokers in asylum governance. She has been Principal Investigator on 'Humanitarian Protection and Organisational Responsibility: Sports-based NGOs as Brokers of Asylum' and Research Partner on the Jean Monnet Erasmus+ funded 'Comparative Network on Refugee Externalisation Policies' (2018-2022). Interdisciplinary interests include public policy design and implementation, corporate social responsibility and sustainability, refugee and forced displacement studies, institutional ethics, and NGO intersections with asylum governance in Australia and the European Union.

Soderstrom has published book chapters such as 'Private sector and migrants: The case of telecommunication companies in CEE in response to Ukrainian migrants' (2025, Routledge) and 'SUSTAINABILITY/CSR RESEARCH IN MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE' (2017, Advances in Management Accounting). Journal articles include 'Reconceptualising merit in the public sector: Introducing a new typology' (2025, Australian Journal of Public Administration, co-authored with Williamson et al.) and a book review in Journal of Citizenship and Globalisation Studies (2019). She co-authored reports for the Australia and New Zealand School of Government, including 'Realities and challenges of implementing merit protection frameworks: Australian Capital Territory, Queensland and Aotearoa New Zealand' (2025) and 'Review of merit, merit protection frameworks and recruitment materials' (2025). Awards include Named Researcher on the Jean Monnet Erasmus+ Network Grant from the European Commission (2018-2022) and AEUIFAI Postgraduate Research Fellow at the European University Institute (2019). Her contributions extend to conference presentations, media articles in The Conversation and Pursuit, and policy commentaries for NGOs like the European Council on Refugees and Exiles.

Professional Email: k.soderstrom@unsw.edu.au