Experts Database

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.

Biography

Janroj Yilmaz Keles is a Senior Research Fellow in Politics at Middlesex University Law School and a Visiting Fellow at London School of Economics (LSE), researching peace and conflict, gender, political violence, ethnicity and nationalism, statelessness, migration, diasporas and international relations, social movements and media and political communication. He is also module leader of International Politics of the Middle East and North Africa, Dissertation and co-lecture of the modules Politics of Globalisation, Post-Brexit Europe: Transformation and Challenges and Migration Theories and Approaches. He also contributed the following modules: Radicalization and Terrorism: Problems and Answers and Theories of International Relations.

Keles has extensive experience in international education. He studied in Turkey, Germany and United Kingdom. He received his PhD in Sociology and Communications from Brunel University. His PhD thesis, entitled "Media, Diaspora and Conflict: Nationalism and Identity amongst Kurdish and Turkish Migrants in Europe" is an interdisciplinary and comparative cross-national study based on a sociologically informed analysis of mass communication, national-ethnic identity, multiple belonging and inter-group relations/conflict within diasporic and/or transnational settings.

He is one of the Co-investigators for the GCRF Hub – Gender, Justice and Security led by the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security in partnership with Middlesex University and other 17 institutions around the world (£15.2 million) (Middlesex University leads Migration & Displacement, £2.6 million, with Professor Eleonore Kofman, Professor Brad Blitz, Dr Janroj Keles and Dr Neelam Raina)

He has been awarded a research grant with Dr Neelam Raina for a study on Post-Conflict Craft Heritage of Iraq and Kurdistan – A scoping study of Samawah and Erbil, funded by Nahren Project, Art and Humanities Research Council and GCFR (£30.000). His fourteen years of experience in researching within higher education has comprised different roles in multiple research projects across disciplines ranging from media and sociology to international relations. Consequently, he has an interdisciplinary and cross-national comparative research background. He has a proven track record of securing external research funding, having contributed as a Research Fellow or co-investigator to projects funded by the ESRC (£360,000), the Horizon 2020 - EU Commission (319,456.00) the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (Clark and Keles, £60,000), and the OECD ( Dodd and Keles, £5000). As a Principal Investigator, he received small grants from the International Organisation for Migration to undertake research on undocumented migrants in the UK (£5000) and from the Council of The British Institute for the Study of Iraq for my research project on “Transnational Mobility and Digital Social Networking (£8000). Moreover, he received a Newton Fund to research the role of transnational entrepreneurship in post-conflict developing economies (Kurdistan-Iraq, £3650).

Previously he worked as an Ethnographic Fieldworker, Compas, University of Oxford, a Lecturer, teaching sociology and media studies at the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University and an Associate Lecturer at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck. He also worked at Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University where he worked on a number of cross-national and interdisciplinary research projects on migration, visual and work sociology, civic engagement and participation, forced labour, human trafficking, precarious work, labour movement and trade union, community, identity, ethnicity, racism and globalization.

While he was doing his PhD, he has been part of a research team to explore 'Legitimising the discourses of radicalisation: Political violence in the new media ecology' for the University of Warwick, worked for Harvard University in London on the political participation and religious integration of Muslims in Europe after 9/11 and participated in the MIGSYS research project (Professor Russell King) to examine the growing diversity of migrant types, nationalities, ethnicities, cultures, languages and motivations, especially in "super-diversity" within the urban settings such as London (see King at el 2008).

He has published several single-authored and co-authored articles in peer-reviewed high-quality journals including Journal of Political Geography, Journal for Ethnic and Migration Studies, The Sociological Review, Antipode, Urban Studies, Middle East Journal of Culture & Communication, Industrial Law Journal, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal. Work, Employment and Society.

My monograph Media, Conflict and Diaspora (I.B. Tauris, 2015), was well-received. In addition, his feature articles were published in University World News, Open Democracy, Foreign Policy, European Union Foreign Affairs Journal and Chartist

He has organized a number of policy-oriented workshops with various stakeholders (government, NGOs, INGOs, EU officials, policymakers, community and business organisations) in the UK, EU and the Middle East.

He supervises master's and doctoral students and acts as an external examiner for the program and PhD theses.

He was an editor of Work, Employment and Society, a leading international peer-reviewed journal of the British Sociological Association (2018-2022).

Follow him at https://twitter.com/janroj

Ilan Kelman http://www.ilankelman.org and Twitter/Instagram @IlanKelman is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England and a Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. His overall research interest is linking disasters and health, including the integration of climate change into disaster research and health research. That covers three main areas: (i) disaster diplomacy and health diplomacy http://www.disasterdiplomacy.org ; (ii) island sustainability involving safe and healthy communities in isolated locations http://www.islandvulnerability.org ; and (iii) risk education for health and disasters http://www.riskred.org