EXPANDING STATELESSNESS SCHOLARSHIP: THE VALUE OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AND EDUCATION LINDSEY N KINGSTON * My first introduction to the issue of statelessness was in northern Thailand, where stateless ‘hill tribes’ faced a gauntlet of human rights violations because they lacked the protections afforded to Thai nationals. 1 Back in 2005, statelessness had failed to garner significant attention from the international community  including non-governmental organisations (‘NGOs’) known for speaking out against such human suffering. 2 The master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation that followed this experience had very little ‘statelessness research’ to build from, although existing scholarship on citizenship, migration and social movements helped guide my way. Today, more than 13 years later, increased attention to this issue has spurred the growth of academic programs and resources aimed squarely at this topic. The Statelessness Programme at Tilburg University (the Netherlands) and the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School (Australia), for instance, offer academic focal points for research and education on this issue. So do issue-specific NGOs such as the European Network on Statelessness and the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (based in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, respectively). With this, the inaugural issue of the Statelessness and Citizenship Review, we are offered another resource for expanding statelessness scholarship and better understanding this oft-ignored issue. These developments are exciting, but they also place us at a pivotal time for determining the direction of research and teaching on statelessness; it is here, at this juncture, when we can (and should) make thoughtful, deliberate decisions about the best path forward. With this goal in mind, I offer my own reflections as an interdisciplinary scholar and educator who remains deeply committed to stateless individuals and to the protection of their fundamental human rights. I have had the opportunity to teach the issue of statelessness at undergraduate and graduate levels, and in both cases my students are at first shocked that so many people around the globe lack any sort of legal nationality  and then are amazed that such a seemingly technical, legalistic issue can have so many real-life consequences. My undergraduate students are drawn from a wide variety of * 1 2 Lindsey N Kingston is an Associate Professor of International Human Rights at Webster University in Saint Louis, Missouri, where she directs the university's Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies. Kingston is a Fulbright Scholar whose work appears in a variety of edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Human Rights, Forced Migration Review, Journal of Human Rights Practice, and International Journal of Refugee Law. Kingston’s monograph Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights is available from Oxford University Press. See, eg, Conny Rijken et al, The Nexus between Statelessness and Human Trafficking in Thailand (Wolf Legal 2015). Lindsey N Kingston, ‘“A Forgotten Human Rights Crisis”: Statelessness and Issue (Non) Emergence’ (2013) 14(2) Human Rights Review 73.