Experts Database

Luisa Faustini Torres is a Margarita Salas Post-doc researcher at Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona. She holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her PhD research focused on the nexus between EU external migration policies and the democratization of countries in the Southern Mediterranean neighbourhood. Her main research interests are migration politics and policies and their relations with processes of autocratization / democratization in the Euro-Mediterranean region and beyond. She is particularly interested in policy analysis and qualitative research methods (content and text analysis with CAQDAS) as well as discussions on ethics and challenges of conducting field work in authoritarian contexts and over sensitive topics.

Irina is a PhD candidate at the Law School of Tilburg University, Netherlands. She holds a M.A. in European Global Studies with a research focus on migration, peace and conflict from the University of Basel, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Zurich. Her doctoral project investigates the crime-migration nexus in mobility-gatekeeping at external EU borders in Croatia, addressing border violence and the facilitation of clandestine human mobility across borders. The research is at the juncture of EU migration law and policy, criminal law, and border criminology. It builds on theoretical frameworks such as crimmigration, anti-policy, state crime, and critical theory, combining legal, political, and ethnographic theories, methods, and data sources.

Mianmian Fei is an incoming Ph.D. student in Educational Studies with a focus on Higher Education and Student Affairs at the Ohio State Univerisity in the United States. She holds an M.A. in Anthropology and Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute as a Hans Wilsdorf Scholar. During her studies in Switzerland, Mianmian also worked as a Consultant at the UNESCO International Bureau of Education.

Astrid M. Fellner is Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University, Germany. She is Co-Speaker in the German Research foundation and Canadian Social Science Foundation-funded interdisciplinary International Graduate Research Training Program “Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Space” that Saarland University and University of Trier are conducting with the Université de Montréal. She is also Project Leader of the EU-funded INTERREG Großregion VA-Project “University of the Greater Region Center for Border Studies” at Saarland U and is Action Coordinator of a trilingual Border Glossary, a handbook of 40 key terms in Border Studies. She has been involved in a DAAD-Eastpartnership project with Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University in Mykolaiv on the topic of “Bridging Borders” since 2014. Since April 2021 she has also been a member of the interdisciplinary BMBF-project “Linking Borderlands,” in which she studies border films and industrial culture of the Greater Region in comparison with the German/Polish border.
Her publications include Articulating Selves: Contemporary Chicana Self-Representation (2002), Bodily Sensations: The Female Body in Late-Eighteenth-Century American Culture (forthcoming) and several edited volumes and articles in the fields of Border Studies, U.S. Latino/a literature, Post-Revolutionary American Literature, Canadian literature, Indigenous Studies, Gender/Queer Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Ph.D. Candidate in International Strategic Studies at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil).
Former Visiting Scholar at Brock University's Political Science Department (Ontario, Canada).

Dr Maria Teresa Ferazzoli is a Research Associate in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield with an interdisciplinary and multifaceted work experience as practitioner and academic.
Maria Teresa is working on the following research projects:

“Everyday Bordering’ in the UK: The impact on social care practitioners and the migrant families with whom they work”, led by Dr Julie Walsh. This study examines the intersections of place, immigration policy, migrant families everyday lives and social care practice.

“MIMY: EMpowerment through liquid Integration of Migrant Youth in vulnerable conditions” – EU Horizon 2020 fund project . The project takes an innovative multi-method approach which places young migrants at the centre of knowledge creation about their resilience, resistance and integration, and the impact of intersecting social inequalities.

In previous role she has worked on research projects that explore particularly sensitive subjects, including the role of faith-based organisations in anti-trafficking, and parent’s experiences of miscarriage, stillbirth and unexplained neonatal death.

Maria Teresa was awarded her PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2019 with the thesis “The formation of deinstitutionalization discourses in Italy and England: a cross-national archaeological study”. Before commencing her PhD studies at Sheffield she completed a Masters’ degree in Psychology at “La Sapienza” University of Rome and she worked as a project coordinator and research with the Newark branch of the national mental health charity Mind.

Dr. Alethia Fernández de la Reguera Ahedo is a full time researcher at the Institute of
Legal Research of UNAM and Coordinator of the National Diversities Laboratory of
UNAM and of the institutional research track: Rights, Migrations and Mobilities. In
2021 she received the National University Distinction Award for Young Scholars 2021 in
the area of social science research. She coordinates the Diploma “Gender and Equality
Policies” and is academic coordinator of the Diploma “International Law for Refugees
and International Protection in Mexico” at UNAM. She is a researcher at CAMINAR
(Comparative Analysis on International Migration and Displacement in the Americas)
and a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI - 1). Specialist in gender and
migration, immigration detention, bureaucracies, gender violence and womens
autonomy. She recently published the article Immigration Detention. the Patriarchal State and the Politics of Disgust in the Hands of Street-level Bureaucrats https://www.lectitopublishing.nl/download/immigration-detention-the-pat…