Experts Database

Dr Gabriela Mezzanotti is Associate Professor in Social Sciences at the University of South-Eastern Norway and a Lawyer. She is the co-leader of USN’s research group “Human Rights and Diversities”. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences and a MA degree in International Law. She chaired the UNHCR Sergio Vieira de Mello Chair at Unisinos University (Brazil) for 8 years. Her research addresses critical discourse studies, critical decolonial and intersectional approaches to rights and policies related to power, human rights and migration. She is a human rights activist and has a wide range of policy and practice-based experiences within migration and minorities contexts with intergovernmental bodies and NGOs in Latin America. She is also the former coordinator of the International Relations BA Program and the Executive Graduate Program in International Relations and Diplomacy at Unisinos University in Brazil. She is a former representative member of COMIRAT (Rio Grande do Sul State Committee for Migrants, Refugees, Stateless Persons, and Human Trafficking Survivors) and COMIRAT/POA (The city of Porto Alegre Committee for Migrants, Refugees, Stateless Persons, and Human Trafficking Survivors). She is a former member of NEABI (Afro descendants and Indigenous studies centre at Unisinos University) and a former member of its United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent Internal Commission. Mezzanotti is a former Associate Editor for the Human Rights Education Review (HRER/USN). She was a visiting faculty at the Federal Judges Superior School, Brazil, and, more recently, at the Institute of Regional Studies, Visiting Professors Programme at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, and at the Visiting Professors Program at the PhD Program in Society, Culture, and Borders, State University of West Parana, Brazil. Her most recent publications address critical and decolonial views on the racialization of Human Rights, Indigenous Peoples on the move, the criminalization of humanitarian aid, migrant detention, refugee protection in Latin America and urban violence in Brazil.

Domna Michail is a Professor of Anthropology of Education, Migration and Minorities, at the Department of Communication and Digital Media of the University of Western Macedonia-Greece (UOWM). She has completed her Bachelor Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Diploma of Advanced Studies and Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and PhD in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) in Great Britain. Currently she is the Director of the Center of Migration and Social Studies of the School of Social and Humanities Studies of the UOWM.

Is a DAAD professor at the Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. She is also professor of sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv). In the spring semesters of 2020 and 2022 she was visiting lecturer at the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland). She has participated in more than 20 sociological research projects, in 10 of which she was a principal investigator. She researches a wide range of areas, including the historical aspects of deviant and delinquent behavior, urban studies, paramilitary motivations, forced displacement, migration and has over twenty years of research and teaching experience. In 2016 she was a visiting professor in Ukraine European Dialogue at the Institute for Human Science (Vienna), and in 2015 she was Eugene and Daymel Shklar Research Fellow Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute.

Stefan Millar is a doctoral candidate in the Law and Anthropology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. He earned a BSc in Anthropology at the University of Kent (United Kingdom), and then conducted his Master’s studies in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research (with a specialization in Social Anthropology) at Tampere University (Finland). Currently, his research examines the role of states within Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement in Turkana county, Kenya. The researcher is a part of a cohort “the technicization of exclusionary practices in the context of migration” at the Law and Anthropology Department, which critically examines the expansion and impact of the EU’s legal and technological strategies to control migration.

Amal Miri holds a PhD in Gender & Diversity from Ghent University. In this ethnographic research at the intersection of marriage migration, motherhood and integration among Moroccan women in Flanders, she conducted feminist and participatory action research with expertise in affective citizenship. As part of this research, she has published in several international peer-reviewed journals such as JEMS. In the past she worked as a project researcher at ella, a non-profit organization promoting the empowerment and participation process of women from ethnic minority (ECM) groups in Brussels and Flanders. During this period Miri worked on a government funded project called NASIB, dedicated to empower and inform actual (Flanders) and future marriage migrants (in Morocco). Today she works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies (CeMIS - department of Sociology).

Mohamed Munas is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Management Research of the Nijmegen School of Management, Department of Geography and Planning, Radboud University, the Netherlands. His PhD dissertation titled “Reconnections”: Complexities of diaspora engagement in Sri Lanka focuses on understanding the collective engagement of diaspora in post-war recovery. This multisited research brings the experiences and perspectives of the individuals and organisational representatives together from Sri Lanka, United Kingdom and Australia. Munas's research critically looks at diaspora-led development interactions and their outcomes on post-war societies using postdevelopment lens. Further, this research looks at how diasporic identities are mobilised to form collectives and organisations that are used as vehicles to channel developmental assistance.

Lea Molina Caminero is a social geographer (M.A. University of Osnabrück) and completed her thesis on lifestyle-oriented youth mobilities to Lisbon in 2020 at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning (IGOT), University of Lisbon. Her research interests cover privileged mobility and its impact on urban and rural areas. Here she is particularly interested in inequalities in labour and mobility regimes and how these are reflected socio-spatially.

Laura Morales is Professor in Political Science/Comparative Politics at Sciences Po, affiliated with CEE. She previously worked at the University of Leicester, the University of Manchester, the University of Murcia, the Complutense University of Madrid and the Autonomous University of Madrid. She has held visiting scholar positions at the Amsterdam School for Social Research, Columbia University, Harvard University and Sciences Po Grenoble. Her research interests lie, especially, in the areas of comparative political behavior, public opinion, political parties, the politics of immigration, and comparative politics. She has published Joining Political Organisations. Institutions, Mobilisation and Participation in Western Democracies, Colchester: ECPR Press, 2009; Political Discussion in Modern Democracies in a Comparative Perspective (edited with Michael Wolf and Ken’ichi Ikeda), London: Routledge, 2010; and Social Capital, Political Participation and Migration in Europe. Making Multicultural Democracy Work? (edited with Marco Giugni), Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011; as well as a number of articles in academic international journals. She is also the Chair of the COST Action "International Ethnic and Immigrant Minorities' Survey Data Network", which gathers a network of researchers from 33 countries working on improving the access, usability, dissemination and standards of the multiple and scattered survey data that exist on the economic, social and political integration of ethnic and migrant minorities. Other recent projects she has worked on include: the project LOCALMULTIDEM (funded by the 6th Framework Programme, on migrants' social capital and participation in Europe; the project Support and Opposition to Migration (funded by the 7th Framework Programme) on the politicization of migration across Europe; the Immigrant Citizens Survey (funded by the European Fund for the Integration of Third Country Nationals and the King Baudouin Foundtion); and the project Pathways (funded by Open Research Area grant of the British ESRC, the Dutch NWO, the French ANR and the German DFG).

Daniel Morales holds a PhD (sociolinguistics and migration studies) and an MA in Transnational Studies by the University of Southampton, UK. He also holds a BA in English Linguistics, Translation and Literary studies by Universidad Autónoma de Queretaro, Mexico. He has been a Fulbright scholar in the United States and is a co-opted member of the International Association of Spanish in Society, an academic network that explores issues around language, globalization and migration, language policy, minority language rights, etc.
He has done research on Latin American migration to the UK where he has explored issues of language and identity and intra-group relations in the Latin American community in London. His research interests include language in society, language ideologies, language, globalization and migration. His work also incorporates different approaches of discourse studies, narrative studies as well as ethnographic methods to shed light on social inequality and exclusion from a sociolinguistic perspective.
He is also a member of Mexico's National System of Researchers by the National Council of Science and Technology.