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Lisa Åkesson

Michaelmas 2016Lisa Åkesson

Lisa Åkesson is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Gothenburg and Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden. Her present research focuses on North–South migration, in particular the new Portuguese labour migration to the former colony of Angola. The main objective is to explore how this new form of mobility informs identities and power relations. The project departs from integration theory and postcolonial theory, but aims to move beyond these approaches.

Armando Aliu

Hilary 2017Armando Aliu

Armando Aliu is a PhD Law Fellow in the Department of International Commerce and the European Union Law at Istanbul Commerce University. He is working on his PhD dissertation 'Competence, Migration Governance and Collaboration in the EU, Balkans and Turkey: An Examination of Migration and Refugees Issues from the European Union Law Perspective'. He holds an MA in European Studies from the University of Hamburg. Armando is currently working as the principal investigator of a large-scale practical research project that is jointly conducted at Istanbul Commerce University and Sakarya University.

Lahoucine Amzil

Michaelmas 2008

Camila Baraldi

Trinity 2013

Camila BaraldiCamila Baraldi is a PhD Candidate at Department of International Relations of University of São Paulo, and a Law bachelor in Brazil as well as in Europe.  Her PhD thesis investigates the immigration policy in Brazil and Mercosur.  Brazil doesn’t have a clear immigration policy and is at an interesting juncture, where the number of emigrants equals that of immigrants - around 2 million. Also, some sectors are experiencing a shortage of labour, due to Brazil’s lack of a skilled labour force in those areas. Our immigration legislation is from the 1980’s, a period when Brazil was under a military dictatorship, and currently is not able to address this situation.  There exist proposals to change the legislation but, though its importance is clear, it is not yet sufficiently big to motivate the politicians. Though Brazilian politics has been slow to move on this issue, there have been significant changes regarding it within Mercosur. Investigating what is behind this apparent contradiction is the aim of her thesis.

Christina Benlloch

Hilary – Trinity 2010

Johara Berriane

Michaelmas 2014 – Hilary 2015

Joharra BerrianeJohara Berriane recently completed her phD at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. Her research focused on the practices and the representations of the Sufi shrine of Ahmad al-Tijani in Fez (Morocco). She was particularly interested in analysing the different meanings of this place and the role of its transnational connections on mobilities as well as on the Moroccan foreign policy towards Africa.

Prior to her doctorate, Johara studied Historical anthropology, political sciences and Islamic studies at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and at the EHESS, Paris. In her master thesis, she investigated the sub-Saharan student mobility towards Morocco. Besides her studies, she took part in research projects on Trans-Saharan transit migration and on Koranic schools in the Sahel region and worked as a consultant for humanitarian NGO’s in Mali and Senegal.

In her new research project, she aims to analyse the socio-cultural transformations that are observable in the frame of south-south migration in Morocco, focusing on the impacts of sub-Saharan migration on the making of religious places, with a particular focus on Christian churches.

Mohamed Berriane

Michaelmas 2009

Natalia Blahova

Trinity 2016

Natalia Blahova

Natalia Blahova is a PhD candidate in Ethnology at the Institute of Ethnology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. The aim of her research is to provide an insight into the issues of relations between mother country and its diaspora. Her doctoral research focuses on the institutional representations of compatriotism. By using the agenda-setting methodology she analyses the process of strategy-making at levels of media, public and policy agenda of the examined institutions.

Aside from her doctoral research she is interested in the research methods of engaged anthropology especially in the area of corporate voluntarism and its role in the engagement of employees of social responsible companies in the community development.

Julien Brachet

Hilary – Trinity 2010

Rafael Cazarin

Trinity 2015

Rafael CazarinRafael Cazarin holds a BA in Sociology from the School of Economics at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where he was awarded a research scholarship from the Centre for Social Studies to assist research practices in Democratic Participation. In 2010 he completed an MSc in Migration Studies followed by an MPhil in Social Sciences in 2011, both at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Spain. In 2012, Rafael was awarded a full grant and fellowship by the Basque Government to develop a doctoral research on African Pentecostalism in Diaspora by a comparative ethnographical approach to migrant churches in Johannesburg and Bilbao. Rafael was also a visiting postgraduate at the African Centre for Migration and Society, Wits University (2009/2013) and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2014) where he currently collaborates as an associate fellow at the Research Centre for the Sociology of Religion - ISOR. His areas of interests are: medical anthropology and sociology, phenomenology of religion and spirituality, emotions, migration and Diaspora, diversity policies and social transformation.

Ali Chaudhary

Michaelmas 2013

Ali ChaudharyAli Chaudhary is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. His research interests lie at the intersection of international migration, political-economic sociology and race and ethnic studies. Under the supervision of Luis E. Guarnizo and Fred Block, his dissertation comparatively analyzes how national state policies and local contexts facilitate or prevent migrant-serving non-profit organizations’ transnational engagement.  Specifically, Ali examines this relationship in the three largest destinations of Pakistani migration in Europe and North America:  London, New York and Toronto.  In his inquiry, Ali combines several data gathering strategies, including official aggregate data on Pakistani immigrants, in-depth interviews with organization leaders, government officials and individual migrants, as well as data on the mission, organizational structure, and composition of Pakistani organizations. As part of his analysis, he is constructing a new dataset of Pakistani migrant-serving organizations to compare how their size, scale, diversity, internal dynamics, and transnational engagement vary across these three locations.  While conducting his dissertation research, Ali has been a visiting scholar at the Monk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and the Department of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

In addition, Ali is also currently working on a number of migration-related papers including a study of political transnational engagement among Colombian and Dominican migrants in Spain and Italy (with Luis E. Guarnizo), a study of Muslim American attitudes towards politically motivated violence (with Gabriel Acevedo), and an analysis of self-employment among immigrants and their offspring in the United States.  He has also been an assistant to  Phil Martin and the UC Davis-Gifford Center for Population Studies and serves as the graduate coordinator for the Gifford Migration Workgroup.

Veysi Dag

Michaelmas 2015 Hilary 2016Veysi Dag

Veysi Dag is a PhD candidate at the Department for Political Science at the Free University of Berlin. Prior to his studies, he worked as a journalist for a pro-Kurdish newspaper between 1998 and 2004. Subsequently, he studied Political Science at the Free University of Berlin and International Relations at the University of Kent in Canterbury. His diploma thesis at the Free University of Berlin, begun in 2013, considered the construction of Kurdish diaspora communities and their transnational activities in Berlin and London in a comparative case study. Since January 2015 he has been a visiting researcher at SOAS, University of London. He is examining the transnational activism of stateless diaspora communities in Berlin, London and Stockholm. He examines the capacity, motivation and conditions of the Kurdish diaspora groups in Berlin, Stockholm and London in an urban context within the theoretical framework of diaspora resources, long-distance nationalism and opportunity structures. The identification and the mobilisation of Kurdish diaspora activities are connected to Kurdish nationalism, fed by compatriots in the countries of origin and the political and institutional settings in the country of settlement. His research interests also include migration studies, peace and conflict studies, comparative policy and regional policy analysis with focus on the Middle East.

Linessa Dan Lin

Hilary – Trinity 2013 and Hilary Trinity 2015

Linessa DanLinessa is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her doctoral project is on African migrants in south China, with a focus on the interactions between Africans and Chinese. Her working project is titled Racial Encounters and Migrant Experience: How Africans and Chinese Interact in a Globalising China. She examines how China and Chinese people react to international migrants when the Chinese society has begun to host them, by particularly examining African migrants’ life in China. The research aims to attain a better understanding of African migrants in China, Sino-African relations in the daily life, and China's multicultural future. She has just finished doing fieldwork in Guangzhou, China, and is conducting archival research at IMI.

Linessa’s research interest includes migration, globalisation, ethnicity, racial relations, ethnic marginalization, urban studies, and the anthropology of China. She has an enduring interest on the topic of the meaning of construction, maintenance, and transformation of the inter-relations between peoples, and that between people and the society. Following this trajectory, she studied inner-Han relations from the view of the Tanka ethnic minority (boat people); then the inter-relations between Han and other nationalities. Prior to the study at Hong Kong, she obtained her Bachelor and Master Degrees from Sun Yat-sen University in China.

Armando Di Lillo

Michaelmas 2016 and Hilary 2017Armando Di Lillo

Armando Di Lillo is a second year PhD student in Economics at IMT School for Advanced Studies, Lucca. His research focuses on the diffusion process of public attitudes towards immigration across Europe over the past decade. He is also interested in looking at evidence on the links between immigration and crime, assessing the impact of implemented asylum policies on public finances, and scrutinising the existence (and, if so, the sign and magnitude) of a relationship between the length of asylum application procedures and crime rates.

Belinda Dodson

Trinity 2015

Belinda DodsonBelinda Dodson is an Associate Professor of Geography and former Director of the Collaborative Graduate Program in Migration and Ethnic Relations at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, migration and development, with a regional focus on Southern Africa. She grew up in Swaziland, South Africa and Zambia and was educated at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, followed by a PhD in Geography at the University of Cambridge. She then taught at the University of Cape Town in South Africa between 1990 and 1997 before moving to Canada. Much of her work over the past 15 years has been carried out under the auspices of the Southern African Migration Program (SAMP) and African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN), in collaboration with Jonathan Crush and others in those larger research programs. In addition to her research on the role of gender in migration patterns and migrant remittances, she has investigated the phenomenon of xenophobia in South Africa and the relationship between gender and urban food security in the Southern African region. She will be using her term at IMI to write, attend seminars, and present one of her own, as well as engaging with Oxford’s Migration and Refugee Studies, Development Studies and African Studies communities.

Marcin Galent

Trinity 2013

Marcin GalentMarcin Galent is assistant professor at the Institute of European Studies. He holds a PhD in sociology from Jagiellonian University and teaches courses in European social policy, social and cultural aspects of European integration, nationalism, multiculturalism, citizenship and migration. He has studied and has conducted research at University of Cambridge, University of Leuven, University of Osaka, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of Oxford.  His current research focuses on relation between migration, Europeanisation, and identity formation processes. He is a leader of the international research project: Migration and Europeanisation. European Identity Building in an Institutional and Interactive Perspective.

Narya García-González

Hilary 2010

Marie Godin

Trinity 2014

Marie GodinMarie Godin is a PhD Candidate at the University of East London (UK) affiliated with the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB). She is also a research associate at the Group for Research on Ethnic Relations, Migration and Equality (GERME) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Marie holds a Masters in Social Science from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and a MSc in Forced Migration from the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford University. She is also a research consultant for a number of international organisations in the field of migration and refugees studies.  Her doctoral research addresses the issue of political activism carried out by Congolese women in the diaspora, aiming to improve understanding of the still under-researched area of gender, diaspora and peace-building/development nexus.

Miriam Gutekunst

Hilary 2015Miriam Gutekunst

Miriam Gutekunst is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. As part of her dissertation project, she carried out ethnographic research in Morocco on migration, borders and the meaning of love and marriage in this context. She is interested in the interplay between migration policies and the practice of migrants. Her work includes perspectives and theories from migration and border regime research, postcolonial and gender studies. She is a member of the Critical Migration and Border Regime Research Laboratory at the University of Göttingen and of the international doctoral programme Transformations in European Societies.

She has published in the special issue Revisting Moroccan Migrations in the Journal of North African Studies and is co-editor of the edited volume Bounded Mobilities: Ethnographic perspectives on social hierarchies and global inequalities.

Sally Khallash

Michaelmas 2011 – Hilary 2012

Nauja Kleist

Michaelmas 2015Nauja Kleist

Nauja Kleist is Senior Researcher in the Global Transformations Unit at the Danish Institute for International Studies. She holds a PhD in sociology (University of Copenhagen) and an MA in International Development Studies (Roskilde University). She has published in, inter alia, African Affairs, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, African Diaspora and African Studies. She has also contributed chapters to edited volumes and is co-editing a book on hope and uncertainty in African migration (to be published by Routledge).

Her research interests include return migration, especially deportation and other kinds of involuntary return, in the context of restrictive mobility regimes in Europe and Africa; diaspora mobilisation and identification; and migration-development policies. She works with theories on hope, (im)mobility, social fields, gender, and belonging. Her recent research analyses the social effects of migration management for West African migrants, with particular focus on Ghana. She has previously worked on Somali diaspora mobilisation processes.

Antonina Levatino

Trinity 2013

Antonina LevatinoAntonina Levatino is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), holding a scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN). She is member of the MAFE-Project, of DEMOSOC and of GRITIM. After an internship in the sector "French Politics" of the Italian Embassy in France, she worked in 2008 as scientific collaborator at the Centre of Cultural and General Studies (ZAK) of the University of Karlsruhe (Germany). More recently, she has been doing an internship at the UNESCO's Section on International Migration and Multicultural Policies in Paris. Last year she worked as a Visiting Researcher at the Chair of Sociology 1 of the Otto-Friedrich Universität Bamberg. Her doctoral project aims to improve understanding on the phenomenon of high‐skilled migration, focusing in particular on the impact of the internationalization of higher education (especially of the offshore provision of educational services and universities’ cooperation programs on high-skilled migration flows.

Álvaro Morcillo-Espina

Michaelmas 2014

Álvaro Morcillo-EspinaÁlvaro Morcillo-Espina holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Granada, and an MSc in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics. He has also been a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Research in International Migration and Ethnic Relations at Stockholm University, in the Cañada Blanch Centre at LSE, and in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester.

Broadly, Álvaro’s research interests lie primarily in migration issues. His prior work focused on migration policies in Spain from the debate transnationalism-methodological nationalism. Since 2012, his projects have aimed to investigate the South African diaspora through collecting new data from South African expatriates around the world. With a sample of five hundreds expats he has analysed the main determinants of return migration to South Africa. The political engagement between the South African diaspora and the homeland has currently become his main research objective.

Bishawjit Mallick

Michaelmas 2016 and Hilary 2017Bishawjit Mallick

Bishawjit Mallick has a PhD in Regional Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. In his PhD thesis, he explores societal change in the context of increasing climatic events, particularly cyclone-affected coastal communities in southwest Bangladesh, as well as examining more broadly disaster-induced migration and its consequences for society. He is interested in the ‘non-migration of people at risk’ in the context of climate change adaptation – why do the people at risk not migrate, and how do they survive in vulnerable environments? – and the role of short-term migration in shaping long-term non-migration. His current research focuses on qualitative and quantitative assessment of migrated livelihoods of people in coastal Bangladesh.

Cleovi Mosuela

Trinity – Michaelmas 2016

Cleovi MosuelaCleovi Mosuela is a doctoral researcher at Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany where she is investigating the bilateral labour agreement of hiring health care professionals from the Philippines to Germany. The research analyses how disparate actors, discourses, and ethical propositions are assembled through the optic of circular migration as a policy tool within the rights-based framework for 'better' cross-border labour migration governance.

Guilherme Ortega

Hilary – Trinity 2016

Guilherme OrtegaGuilherme is interested in the effects of internal migration on metropolitan areas, and the influence of the economic development on migration. He graduated in Sociology (University State of Campinas, Brazil), where he studied why individuals with similar way of lives and assets decided to migrate or not. Guilherme has a Masters Degree in Demography (University State of Campinas, Brazil). In his dissertation he explored the characteristics of the migration of heads of households (men and women), their education, position in the labour market, the role of residence and participation in social networks, in order to facilitate and/or encourage the decision making process to migrate. Guilherme is currently a PhD student in Demography (University State of Campinas, Brazil) studying the importance of the industrial development of the Metropolitan Area of Campinas for the migration process.

Merve Özer

Michaelmas 2016

Merve ÖzerMerve Özer is a PhD candidate at the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA), Maastricht University, Netherlands. Her dissertation is on reasons and consequences of migration, particularly on behavioural aspects of migration decision and destination choice and on long-run effects of migration on socioeconomic outcomes.

 

Francisco Barros Rodríguez

Michaelmas 2013

Francisco Barros RodríguezFrancisco Barros Rodríguez is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Sociology of the University of Granada, Spain. He has a Bachelor of Sociology (2010) and Labour Sciences (2012), and a Masters in Social Problems: Leadership and Management of Social Programs (2011). His academic interests focus on issues of Moroccan labour migration, industrial relocation and the labour market. He has also researched residential segregation of immigrants, globalization and migration to Europe.

His PhD research, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, explores impacts on the migratory path and work of Moroccans in Spain, depending on whether they have worked in the export industry in their origin country or, in contrast, gained experience in another profession. The research pays special attention to the processes of industrial relocation in northern Morocco.

Melissa Siegel

Michaelmas 2012

Laura Stielike

Trinity 2014

Laura StielikeLaura is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Political Science at Free University Berlin,Germany. She has studied political science at Free University Berlin and at Science Po, Paris. In her master‘s thesis she researched the colonial continuities of German development co-operation in the era of good governance. As teaching assistant for the Chair of Gender and Diversity Studies at Free University Berlin, Laura has taught courses on migration theory, postcolonial studies and discourse analysis. She has also worked for German development co-operation in China, an NGO in Cameroon and the documentary film project "Kinshasa Symphony".

Laura's research interests include diaspora and development studies, discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, governmentality studies, intersectionality, migration and film. Laura‘s PhD project focuses on the contradictions between living conditions for Cameroonian migrants in Germany and development demands expressed by development agencies in Germany and communities in Cameroon. Through interviews with individual migrants and representatives of Cameroonian diaspora associations she has come to concentrate on the question of how experiences of racism in government agencies, the job market and daily life shape Cameroonian migrants‘ diaspora activities and life and career planning. She is further interested in the impact of colonial ties and memories on the increasing migration of Cameroonian students to Germany as well as on the diaspora‘s perspective on development cooperation and policies supporting diaspora projects.

Gabreile Tomei

Trinity 2010

Magdalena Ulceluse

Hilary 2017Magda Ulceluse

Magdalena Ulceluse is a Marie Curie Phd candidate in Political Science at the Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Relations, Central European University. She obtained her BSc in Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration in Timisoara, Romania and went on to gain an MSc in Public Policy and Human Development from the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance/UNU-MERIT in the Netherlands. She has previously worked on projects for the ILO, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European Commission, CEDEFOP and ISFOL, among others. Her main research interests lie in labour migration, immigration and labour policies, as well as the effect of institutional factors on immigrants’ economic activities.

Aysen Üstübici

Trinity 2013

Aysen ÜstübiciAysen Üstübici is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Koc University.  She is writing her PhD on migration and citizenship policies in the context of Morocco and Turkey under the supervision of Prof. Ahmet İçduygu. By conducting interviews in state departments and by focusing on how migrants conceive of their legal status, her r

esearch aims to reveal the interaction between the implementation of laws and the emigrants' and immigrants' experience of citizenship and legal status in Turkey and Morocco.  She has actively participated in the quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis in different parts of Turkey in the context of the EUMAGINE project. As she compares Morocco and Turkey and is interested on the impact of mobility transition and broader social transformation on migration policies, she believes that the visiting fellow scheme at IMI will highly contribute to her own research.

Darshan Vigneswaran

British Academy Fellow, 2008