Experts Database

Hanne Cecilie Kavli is a senior researcher and research director at Fafo with immigration and integration as her special area. She has worked extensively on issues related to welfare and integration policy, family practices and gender equality in immigrant families, how attitudes and values ​​influence women's professional participation and how the organization of welfare states and labor markets influence women's motivation and opportunity to participate in working life. She is currenty also involved in several research projects on different welfarestates influence the development of institutional and social trust among refugees. She has broad experience in obtaining, using and analyzing both qualitative interviews, surveys and register data.

Kavli has led a large number of research projects at Fafo and has conducted extensive editorial work. She also conducts extensive dissemination work by giving invited lectures, writing op-eds and arranging seminars and conferences.

Nilay is a post-doctoral researcher at Migration Research Center at Koç University (MiReKoç) and a lecturer in the Sociology Department of Koç University. She holds a dual doctorate degree from Doctorate in Cultural and Global Criminology Program at University of Kent (UK) and Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary). Prior to her current position, she has worked as post-doctoral researcher at Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology at Utrecht University, Netherlands. Her research interests lie in sociology of law, sociology of human rights, migration and criminology. She has recently been involved in two research projects; one on migration-development nexus (MIGNEX), another on advancing alternative migration governance (ADMIGOV). Besides, she conducts research on “NGO’s in Turkey in the midst of the State, the UN, the EU, and Donors” with the seed-fund granted by Koç University. She is the Engaged Research Officer at UNIC for Engaged Research (UNIC4ER) as part of the UNIC European University Consortium.

Ayhan Kaya is Professor of Politics and Jean Monnet Chair of European Politics of Interculturalism at the Department of International Relations, Istanbul Bilgi University; Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence; and a member of the Science Academy, Turkey. He is currently European Research Council Advanced Grant holder (ERC AdG, 2019-2024). He received his PhD and MA degrees at the University of Warwick, England. Kaya was previously a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence, Italy, and adjunct lecturer at the New York University, Florence in 2016-2017. He previously worked and taught at the European University Viadrina as Aziz Nesin Chair in 2013, and at Malmö University, Sweden as the Willy Brandt Chair in 2011. He is specialised on European identities, Euro-Turks in Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Circassian diaspora in Turkey, the construction and articulation of modern transnational identities, refugee studies in Turkey, conventional and nonconventional forms of political participation in Turkey, and the rise of populist movements in the EU. Kaya is recently working on a manuscript about the populist political style in Europe. His forthcoming manuscript is Populism and Heritage in Europe. Lost in Diversity and Unity (London: Routledge). His fortcoming edited volume is Memory in European Populism (London: Routledge, with Chiara de Cesari). Some of his books are Turkish Origin Migrants and their Descendants: Hyphenated Identities in Transnational Space (Palgrave, 2018), Europeanization and Tolerance in Turkey (London: Palgrave, 2013); Islam, Migration and Integration: The Age of Securitization (London: Palgrave, 2012); Contemporary Migrations in Turkey: Integration or Return (Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2015, in Turkish, co-edited with Murat Erdoğan), Belgian-Turks, Brussels: King Baudouin Foundation, 2008, co-written with Ferhat Kentel), Euro-Turks: A Bridge or a Breach between Turkey and the EU (Brussels: CEPS Publications, 2005, co-written with Ferhat Kentel, Turkish version by Bilgi University); wrote another book titled Sicher in Kreuzberg: Constructing Diasporas, published in two languages, English (Bielefeld: Transkript verlag, 2001) and Turkish (Istanbul: Büke Yayınları, 2000). He also translated Ethnic Groups and Boundaries by Fredrik Barth and Citizenship and Social Classes by T. H. Marshall and Tom Bottomore to Turkish language. He also edited several books on migration, integration, citizenship, and diasporas. Kaya’s publications have been translated to several languages such as French, German, Japanese, Italian, Arabic and Dutch. Kaya was actively participated involved in FP7 projects, and now he is involved in two different Horizon 2020 research projects on populism and Turkey-EU relations. Kaya received Turkish Social Science Association Prize in 2003; Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA-GEBİP) Prize in 2005; Sedat Simavi Research Prize in 2005; Euroactiv-Turkey European Prize in 2008, the Prize for the best Text Book given by TÜBA; and also the Prize for excellence in teaching at the Department of International Relations, Istanbul Bilgi University in 2013 and 2017.

Merve Reyhan Kayikci is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the department of Semitic Studies of the University of Granada (Spain) and collaborator at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre, KU Leuven (Belgium). She is the project coordinator of the H2020 RETOPEA project She obtained her PhD from the IMMRC, KU Leuven. Her doctoral work investigated the intersections of volunteering and ethical self becoming among Belgian Muslim female volunteers. Kayikci is the author of Islamic Ethics and Female Volunteering Committing to Society, Committing to God. She is the co-editor of Muslim Volunteering in the West: Between Islamic Ethos and Citizenship and European Muslims and New Media.

Elif Naz Kayran is a Post-doctoral researcher at Leiden University. She holds a PhD from the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Graduate Institute of Geneva (IHEID). Previously, she was a Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, for the academic year 2019-20. Her PhD project explored the effects of employment risks on public attitudes towards immigration and support for radical right-wing parties. Her work on welfare states and the limits of skill-selective immigration policies has appeared in the Journal of European Social Policy and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Hari is a migration scholar with research interests in the politics of migration, pertaining to labour migration along South Asia-Middle East corridors, migration policy and governance, and gender and migration. In his doctoral research, he explored the issues of Nepali women migrant domestic workers in the Arabian Gulf countries. This research was based on six months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Nepal, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates with funding support of the IDRC Doctoral Research Award. He has collaborated on several research projects, including the Gender + Migration Hub which seeks to enhance the capacity of governments, civil society and other stakeholders in designing and implementing gender-responsive migration policies and programs. Hari is associated with the International Migration Research Centre at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, where he taught a range of undergraduate and graduate courses on migration, citizenship, and global justice. Before joining CERC Migration, Hari was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Wilfrid Laurier University where he focused on the nexus of labour migration, migration governance and food in/security from a gender perspective. In the past, he also taught at Tribhuvan University in Nepal and worked for the BBC Media Action, Embassy of India, and the Carter Centre. Hari has a PhD in Global Governance from the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, and master’s degrees in English and Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Waterloo.

Ai Ke is a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of Humanities at the University of Warsaw. She has received her M.A. from Inter-Asia Cultural Studies at National Tsing Hua University (Hsinchu, Taiwan) and Master in Sociology at the Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing). While in Beijing, she focused on the gender and everyday-life tactics of the post-80s youth born after the Reform and Opening up. Later on, she turned to a broader social and cultural changes and went to Taiwan to study, extending the historical perspective of the Reform and Opening up across the Taiwan Strait, exploring alternative histories in the Taiwan Modern Folks Song Movement. Her current research interests focus on the identity tactics of Taiwanese young people (Taiqing) in China that she addresses from the perspective of migration and diaspora studies.

Jana Keck is a research fellow and coordinator of the research area Digital History at the German Historical Institute Washington DC (GHI). She studied English and American studies and linguistics at the University of Stuttgart. Before joining the GHI, she was working in the research project “Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914” which boasted a team of scholars in computational periodical studies from seven countries in Europe and the Americas to examine transcontinental news circulation in C19 newspapers. In her PhD-project “Text Mining America’s German-Language Newspapers, 1830-1914: Processing Germanness,” she investigates viral texts and genres in America’s C19 German-language press to study how sexist, racist, and nationalistic ideas spread across states and decades.

Rahime Özgün Kehya (PhD) is an academic at Kafkas University in the Department of Cinema and Television. Her research focuses on migration, gender, integration, cultural diversity and otherness in film and media studies. She conducted a research project at the Institute of Media Studies at the Philipps University of Marburg in Germany. She has worked for multinational companies and directed and co-produced several short films. She has received research and merit scholarships from DAAD in Germany and TUBITAK in Turkey.

Julija Kekstaite is a Ph.D. fellow at the Department of Social Work and Pedagogy and the Department of Sociology at University of Ghent. She has received her MSc in Sociology, Migration and Ethnic Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include sociological examination of forced migration, civic engagement, immigration policies and feminist theory. Her current project investigates hospitality practices with illegalized migrants in Brussels and Rome and contemporary forms of kinship emerging in these settings.