Experts Database

My research focuses on migration histories and the experiential qualities of place, developing a landscape specific contribution within a broad field of literature encompassing belonging and isolation, conviviality and racism, transnational connections and the shaping of cultures of use of public open space. I firmly believe in producing research in collaboration with others and I am committed to working with the professional and voluntary sector in all my research projects.
Through a number of research projects, these themes have been developed within two more specific strands: 1) Inclusive Public Open Spaces and 2) Diverse nature connections.

Dan Rodríguez-García is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Director of the INMIX-Research Group on Immigration, Mixedness, and Social Cohesion at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His areas of research are international migration, interethnic relations, identity, racism and discrimination, with a particular focus on ‘mixedness’ (intermarriage and multiracialism).

Postdoctoral Research Fellow with demonstrated record of research success in Balkan Studies, South-East European Studies, Border Studies and Migration Studies. Currently postdoctoral fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin. PhD thesis on Slavic and Albanian collective memory and contemporary identity discourses in Macedonia defended at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland). Research conducted addresses the interface of visual culture, anthropology and memory studies, and focuses on South Slavic-Albanian borderlands.

Taras Romashchenko is a Ukrainian scholar with research interests in international economics, international labour migration and diaspora, FDI and remittances. PhD in Economics and Associate Professor at Bohdan Khmelnytsky National University of Cherkasy. He is also a senior lecturer in international economic relations and migration, as well as a visiting professor at Bielefeld University (Germany) and has been a visiting research fellow at Danube University Krems (Austria).

Sanam Roohi is a Marie Curie COFUND fellow at Max Weber Kolleg, Erfurt, currently researching the transnationalisation of the Telangana movement. She defended her thesis ‘Giving Back: Diaspora Philanthropy and the Transnationalisation of Caste in Guntur (India)’ from the University of Amsterdam in December 2016. Her research outputs include publication of a few book chapters and articles in journals including Modern Asian Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, International Political Sociology and Ethnic and Migration Studies, apart from a co-produced film on diaspora philanthropy. She worked as an assistant professor at St. Joseph’s (Autonomous), Bangalore, between September 2016 and April 2018. Roohi was a 2018 SSRC InterAsia Fellow at the Global and Transregional Studies Platform, Georg-August University, Göttingen. She has also been awarded a Humboldt fellowship which starts in September 2020 at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen.

Dr. Mariana Rosca has been enrolled in the Ph.D. program on Human Rights: Ethical, Social, and Political Challenges funded by Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie COFUND Programme, where she focusses on social integration of religious minorities. Born in Moldova, living in different countries within and outside Europe, much of Mariana’s personal interests, academic passion and intellectual curiosity have revolved around diaspora communities, migration, religious minorities and social integration. She holds a BA in Economy and Sociology from Academy of Economic Studies, Republic of Moldova, a MA in Global Development and Social Justice from St. John´s University, New York and a second Master in Advanced European and International Studies from European Institute, France.

Dr Lena Rose is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Law Faculty at the University of Oxford. Her research areas are migration and refugee studies, legal anthropology, religion, and globalisation.

Her current three-year interdisciplinary research project entitled 'Christianity on Trial: Asylum, Conversion, and the Modern Nation-State' (2019-2022) examines the negotiation of ‘Christianity’ through the lens of asylum adjudications of claimants based on the fear of religious persecution following a conversion to Christianity. In these cases, secular judges have to assess the genuineness of the conversion, and risks of practising Christianity in the country of origin of the applicants. This study of case law and ethnographic fieldwork at courts in Germany, France, and the UK explores the tensions between culture, religion, and power in the negotiation of what 'Christianity' is.

Lena completed her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology in May 2019, based at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford. Her doctoral work was concerned with the role of power in the circulation of ideas, resources, people, and theology within global evangelicalism. She conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Palestinian and 'Western' evangelical Christians in Israel-Palestine, Europe and North America, while paying attention to the theologies that shape evangelicals' approaches to Israel. Her doctoral work has already resulted in a number of publications in journals such as Current Anthropology, Global Networks, and Ethnos.

Lena holds an MSc Migration Studies (University of Oxford, 2013) and has worked as research assistant on various projects at the International Migration Institute, the Refugee Studies Centre, and the Socio-Legal Studies Centre (in particular Prof Livia Holden's EURO-EXPERT project).

Since 2017, Lena is the co-founder and convener of the interdisciplinary Oxford Migration and Mobility Network (@MigMobNetwork), which draws together researchers of migration and mobility from across the University. It is hosted by the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity at COMPAS and combines the expertise of more than a hundred researchers from more than twenty different departments from across the University of Oxford.

PD Dr. Stefan Rother is a senior researcher at the Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institute for socio-cultural research, and lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg, Germany. In the winter term 2019/20 he acted as interim professor (Vertretungsprofessur) at the Chair of International Politics, University of Freiburg. His research focus is on international migration, global governance, social movements, regional integration and non-/post-Western theories of international relations. He was previously a fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) and researcher and editorial manager of the “International Quarterly for Asian Studies”. In 2019, he was co-convener of the International Fellow Group “Migration, Mobility and Forced Displacement” at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), University of Ghana.
In 2019, he completed his cumulative habilitation on „Multi-level Governance from below? Migrant Civil Society and the Democratisation of International Institutions”. Rother received his doctorate at the Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg with the thesis “Diffusion in transnational political spaces: Political activism of Philippine labor migrants in Hong Kong". He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Southeast Asia as well as participant observation at global governance fora and civil society parallel and counter-events at the UN, ILO, ASEAN and WTO-level as well as European Forum on Migration and World Social Forum on Migration. Stefan Rother has published articles in Third World Quarterly, Cooperation and Conflict, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Globalizations, European Journal of East Asian Studies, International Migration, Migration Studies, the German Journal for Political science (ZPol) and several edited volumes. He is a board member of the German Association for Asian Studies (DGA) and speaker of the working group on migration in the German political science association (AK Migrationspolitik in der DVPW). His latest monograph is “Democratization through Migration? Political Remittances and Participation of Philippine Return Migrants” (Lexington 2016, with Christl Kessler).