Experts Database

Josepha Wessels is a visual anthropologist/human geographer, Associate Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the School of Arts and Communication (K3), Faculty of Culture and Society at Malmö University. She teaches at the MA degree course on Communication for Development (ComDev). She has over 25 years of experience of travelling and working in the MENA region and is currently carrying out research on Syrian Refugees in Jordan, Turkey and Sweden and Academia and cultural production as postmigrant fields in Sweden
See further: https://mau.se/en/persons/josepha.wessels/

Leah Williams Veazey is ARC DECRA Research Fellow in the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Sydney. She is the author of the award-winning book Migrant Mothers in the Digital Age (2021, Routledge) and has published widely in the areas of migration, parenthood, digital cultures, and experiences of health and healthcare. Her research uses qualitative methods, most commonly in-depth interviews, to explore contemporary social experiences, with a focus on the intersections of health, mobility and relational sociology.

Leah's current research, funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) entitled "Future-proofing Australia's Care Economy", explores the intersections of work, migration and care in the lives of healthcare workers and healthcare students. Specifically, the project explores how healthcare workers’ family relationships and informal care responsibilities shape their migration decisions, experiences in the workplace and plans for the future.

Leah co-convenes The Australian Sociological Association’s Migration, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism Thematic Group, and co-leads the Migration, Im/mobility and Belonging Research Theme at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies. She is Associate Editor at the Australian Journal of Social Issues, and an Associate Investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

Leah completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Sydney, a qualitative study of migrant mothers and their online communities in Australia, supervised by Associate Professor Catriona Elder and Professor Susan Goodwin. Since then, she has taught across the Discipline of Sociology & Criminology and the School for Public Health, and has worked on a number of research projects, including an ARC-funded project on the history of sociology, led by Associate Professor Fran Collyer, and an NHRMC-funded project on the experiences of healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, led by Professors Lyn Gilbert and Alex Broom. Her recent projects include experiences of contemporary cancer care, the social life of death, and the social dimensions of antimicrobial resistance.

Currently, at the University of Groningen, I am researching first-generation high-skilled Chinese migrants in Germany. For this project, I conducted in-depth interviews with 62 participants and analyzed the data using Atlas. ti.

I am highly skilled in participant observation and in-depth interview methodologies, with advanced proficiency in qualitative analysis software such as Atlas. ti and Nvivo.

Additionally, I bring over 7 years of experience as a college lecturer, having taught courses in Educational Theory and Chinese Traditional Culture.

My primary research interests focus on the everyday experiences of transnational highly skilled migrants, the values of migrants, the alienation of migrants in the host country, and the impact of social media on migrant lives.

Zetong Xiao is a Ph.D. Student in History of Latin America at Complutense University of Madrid. His research project focuses on Chinese immigration to Costa Rica between 1900-2010, with an emphasis on the transformation of transnational connections and the construction of migrant networks. He is also expanding his interest to food studies, particularly the cultural politics of food and foodscapes of Chinese Latin American cuisine.

My interdisciplinary research connects the theoretical and conceptual borders of political science, sociology, and political psychology. Specifically, I work on migrant organisations in host countries (diaspora organizations) and recipient countries (civic networks and organizations that advocate refugee /migrant rights). In my current project, I investigate alternative communicative narratives that such organisations can adopt to reach out to the wider public. These communicative narratives reframe migrants and refugees as 'deserving' and 'rights-bearing agents' and seek to generate cross-partisan public deliberation and positive attitudes. In my current project, I combine fieldwork, network analysis, surveys and online randomized experiments to predict how social change for more inclusive societies can be initiated. This research aims to offer policy-relevant alternatives to change racialized attitudes of various ideological, socio-economic, and psychographic groups as well as non-citizens (migrants and refugees).

Evren Yalaz is a postdoctoral researcher at GRITIM-UPF (Interdisciplinary Research Group on Migration-Universitat Pompeu Fabra). Her areas of interest include qualitative research in migration studies, research ethics, migrant politics, transnationalism, and social movements.

Lior Yohanani is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. He holds an MA in Sociology from Tel Aviv University and from Rutgers. His work focuses on questions of migration, nationalism, identity, and collective action. In his dissertation project, Lior focuses on diaspora soldiers in the Israeli military. He examines what makes those soldiers come to Israel and join the military, the service period's impact on their views and migration intentions, and the role of state initiatives and diaspora organizations in advancing recruitment. Lior’s work has been published in Nations and Nationalism and in Sociological Forum.