Experts Database

Sarah Spencer is Director of Strategy and a Senior Fellow at COMPAS and was Director of the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity from its inception in 2014 until March 2019. She is Chair of the Board of Directors of IMISCOE, the European network of migration research institutes and scholars, and a member of Kellogg College, Oxford’s largest and most international graduate college.

Sarah’s research interests focus on irregular migrants, on which she has been PI in projects on national and city responses to irregular migrants in Europe, initiated under an Open Society Fellowship, and on families with No Recourse to Public Funds in the UK; on integration (on which she is collaborating with Katharine Charsley, University of Bristol), human rights and equality issues, and on the policy making process. Sarah was awarded her doctorate at Erasmus University Rotterdam, has an MPhil from University College London and took her first degree at the University of Nottingham.

At the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, Sarah is responsible for the City Initiative on Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe (C-MISE); and for Oxford’s contribution to the Urban Innovative Action project in Utrecht, the Refugee Launchpad. She was Director of its Autumn Academy symposium from 2016-2018 and responsible for its award-winning online tool to assess the eligibility of migrant families for local authority support.

Sarah was a co-founder of the network of equality and human rights organisations in Britain, the Equality and Diversity Forum (now ‘Equally Ours’) and its Chair for ten years (2002-2012); a Commissioner and Deputy Chair (2003-2005) of a statutory body, the Commission for Racial Equality; Programme Director at the Institute for Public Policy Research (1990-2003); and Director of the human rights NGO, Liberty (1984-1989). She has twice been seconded into the Cabinet Office strategy unit to contribute to studies on migration policy and has been a member of government Taskforces and advisory bodies. In 2007 she received a CBE for services to equality and human rights.

Anna Spiegel is a research associate at the Research and Teaching Unit on Economics and Work at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University. She has carried out research on transnational mobility of people and knowledge in different world regions. In her research on translocal life worlds of female Bolivian migrants in the Global City Buenos Aires she concentrated on dance as a translocal practice. As a researcher in the VW funded Project “Negotiating Development: Translocal Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies” and in her doctoral thesis she focused on the transnational negotiations of Women’s and Human Rights in Malaysia in the context of Islamisation. In her current research she works on the ambivalences and paradoxes of practiced elite cosmopolitanisms of executive expatriates employed in transnational corporations and their new forms of working, belonging and dwelling.

Her main research interests are: transnationalization and mobility, skilled and non-skilled migration, global negotiations of knowledge, global ethnography, belonging, transience

Niels Spierings studies questions of inclusion, the degree to which people want, can and are 'allowed to' participate in social, economic and political spheres. His most recent projects focus on gender/sexual equality among and political inclusion of Muslim citizens in Western Europe. In addition, he keeps working on the questions of women's labour market participation (inequalities) among migrant women, quantitative intersectionality research, and anti-migrant and anti-gender politics (in particular the populist radical right)

Dr Joy Spiliopoulos joined the SAPPHIRE research group, Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Leicester, UK, in June 2023. She is part of the NIHR funded Greater Manchester Patient Safety Research Collaboration as a Research Associate for the theme: 'Enhancing cultures of safety'. She is a Visiting Fellow for the Centre of Health Innovation, Leadership and Learning (CHILL) at the Nottingham University Business School, UK.
Her background is in Applied Social Science/Social Work and she holds a PhD from the Department of Applied Social Science (now Department of Sociology), Lancaster University.
She has worked for academic institutions in the UK (Lancaster University, University of Leicester and Sheffield College) and China (University of Nottingham Ningbo China, and Zhejiang University) and taught in the subject areas of sociology, international relations, criminology, gender studies.
She has worked on a number of collaborative projects funded by NGOs and government bodies (NIHR, ESRC, DFID, Oxfam, UK Home Office, local authority funded projects). She recently completed two funded projects on the effects of 'Brexit' on the retention and recruitment of migrant NHS nurses; and on returnee Filipino nurses. The collaborative project she led, 'Retention and recruitment of migrant nurses post-Brexit', has received international media attention, including BBC Radio Nottingham interview and features in television, newspaper, think tanks and internet blogs in the USA, China, Singapore, the UK and other European countries, also from bodies such as the Royal College of Nursing (Nursing Standard journal), and others. Joy's research focuses on issues of migration, gender, racism, exploitation and discrimination, UK race relations, social and health inequalities, adult social care, and others, using primarily feminist theory (intersectionality, critical feminist theory). Much of her work has focused on the positioning of nurses, care workers and domestic workers, in the NHS and the social care sector, in the UK and elsewhere (the Philippines), and more recently on the retention and recruitment of migrant nurses post-Brexit. She has a particular interest in social impact, public engagement and co-creation with stakeholders.

Doutoranda em Administração pelo Programa de Pós Graduação da Escola de Administração da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (PPGA/EA/UFRGS) e Pesquisadora no Observatório Internacional de Carreiras (OIC - PPGA/EA/UFRGS). Possui Especialização em Administração Pública Contemporânea pela UFRGS (2018); graduação em Administração de Empresas (2011) e graduação em Direito (2006); MBA em Gestão de Pessoas, com formação para o Magistério Superior (2012) e Mestrado em Direção de Recursos Humanos pela Universidad de Ciencias Empresariales y Sociales/UCES/Buenos Aires (2015), reconhecido pelo PPGA/EA/UFRGS. Servidora Técnica-Administrativa em Educação lotada na Pró-Reitoria de Gestão de Pessoas da UFRGS, possui experiência na área de Administração, com ênfase em Administração de Recursos Humanos e Gestão de Organizações Públicas.

I have a degree in Sociology from the Nicolaus Copernicus University of Torun and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Complutense University of Madrid (2008). Previously I worked as a researcher at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spain) and the Centro de Estudios Sociales of the University of Coimbra (Portugal), and as a lecturer at the Complutense University of Madrid. I have been an external expert for LINET (Independent Network of Labour Migration and Integration Experts – International Organization for Migration) and FRANET (Multidisciplinary Research Network at the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights). My main areas of research interest are intra-EU mobility, economic integration of immigrant populations and population and immigrant health.

Barbara Staniscia, Ph.D., Research Scientist in Geography at Sapienza University of Rome, she teaches Geography of Tourism and Human Mobility. Scientific secretary of the IGU Commission “Global change and human mobility-GLOBILITY”.

I am a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, Oslo Metropolitan University. I am the Principal investigator on the Norwegian Research Council funded project "Regulating Migration and Integration through Monetary Requirements (REMIMO, 2021-2025), and I regularly undertake commissioned research for Norwegian public sector institutions.

I hold a PhD in Political Science (comparative/public policy) from the University of Toronto (2014) and an MSc in Forced Migration from the University of Oxford. My doctoral work investigated the introduction of more restrictive family immigration policies in Denmark, Norway and the UK 1997-2012. I employ qualitative methods such as interviews and documnt analysis, and I work at the intersection of law and political science.

I have significant non-academic experience in the immigration field, having previously worked for the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, Norwegian Police Immigration Service and the secretariat of the Intergovernmental Consultations on Migration, Asylum and Refugees (a consultative process uniting 17 states, whose secretariat is hosted by IOM in Geneva).