Karen Wren is a geographer who specialises in international migration. She has conducted research both in Britain and in a wider European context. Her doctoral thesis focused on international migration to Denmark, and examined the way in which racist discourses in the public sphere have been linked to the development of policies of spatial control. In particular, she focused on the implementation of a policy to disperse refugees, and its effects both on individual refugees and on localities where refugees have been dispersed. She built on this experience while working as a teaching and research fellow in the Department of Geography, University of St Andrews, through her work with SALTSA (Joint Programme for Working Life Research) in Stockholm. During this time, she co-ordinated a pilot study examining the links between migration, employment and health in three European countries.

Her current research is based in Scotland where she has highlighted the role of the voluntary sector in providing services for asylum seekers and refugees in Glasgow. This is being followed up by work in progress which examines the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees as service users in Glasgow. She is currently a research fellow at the Scottish Centre for Research on Social Justice and is based at Aberdeen University.