Experts Database

Born in Cracow, Poland, Wiktor lives in London. He is an MSc International Social and Public Policy candidate at the Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics. He carries out his independent research affiliated in CASPAR lab, Cracow University of Economics.

He works as a consultant for the Centre for Strategy in Evaluation Services (CSES) LLP, where he has been involved in the research on European public policies commissioned by the clients such as the DG EAC, DG JUST, DG GROW, the European Parliament, and others.

I am a research fellow (postdoc starting November 2023) at the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe (GCE), University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. I study irregularised migration and removal as an anthropologist and work at the intersections of critical border studies and the field of “affective sciences” to bring to light the undeniable power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes in the migratory lives of people subjected to unequal mobility through restrictive border regimes.

I am a social and political psychologist whose research seeks to support dialogue between citizens and their governments on vexed political questions such as migration, sovereignty, European and Global citizenship.
I moved from the Scottish Government to the Open University in 2007. As a psychologist I am particularly interested in the conditions when people move from public opinion to public dialogue.
My starting point is that public decision-making on migration, citizenship and the boundaries of belonging often inter-relate with an individual's own degree of migration-mobility. I measure this using a 10-point Migration-Mobility Continuum. I have set out the relationship between the MMC and integration, citizenship, populism, sense of home and one-world narrative (OWN) in a series of open-access publications.

Sowmya Maheswaran is doing her PhD at the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt University (Berlin) and is a doctoral fellow of the Hans Böckler Foundation. At the intersection of global and political anthropology, her dissertation deals with political subjectivities of dissidents and their cultures of resistance in violent contexts. Postcolonial negotiations and global entanglements of racism, nationalism, and migration/(im-)mobilities in war and post-war situations form her central lines of research. The ethnographic focus of the ongoing PhD project is on Tamil conflicts and struggles in Sri Lanka and related transnational diaspora movements.

With over 15 years of dedicated experience in humanitarian work, I have been a refugee practitioner originally from Syria and based in Germany since 2012. My work involves safeguarding refugee and migration rights and providing counseling on family reunification and integration matters. I am a member of the Network for Dialogue at KAICIID, facilitating integration through interreligious and intercultural dialogue. For the past two years, I have been conducting a short study on the Nest Programme SHARE legal pathway, promoting education, and advocating for diversity and inclusion across Europe and Central Asia.

Moritz Mähr is Junior Fellow of the IFN at the WBKolleg at the University of Bern and digital project manager at Stadt.Geschichte.Basel at University of Basel. He studied history and philosophy of knowledge, computer science, and banking & finance in Zurich and Berlin. From 2018 to 2022, he was a research assistant at the Chair of the History of Technology at ETH Zurich and wrote a dissertation on the digitization of migration authorities in Switzerland in the 1960s. The study was part of the SNSF-funded project Trading Zones. His research interests include science & technology studies, digital humanities, and history of computing. He is an advocate of open science, open access, and open source.

My research straddles criminology sociology and anthropology and focuses on the experiences and representations of criminalised marginalised and stigmatised migrant groups.

My work is qualitative and based on an ethnographic long term engagement with the people and communities with whom I undertake my research.

I am also a filmmaker and my films complement my academic writing and emerge through the collaboration with migrants and sex workers and by expressing their perspectives priorities and needs.

I believe collaborative filmmaking is a way to create knowledge together with people who are directly concerned and to make sure that they own the terms of their representations.

My ambition is that the films and publications that result from my work will reach out further from the academic world into public and political debates and that they will contribute to changing policies according to the priorities and needs of their protagonists.

In the future I would like to continue my work on migration by focusing on the relationship with climate change the transition to green societies and the displacements and mobilities that are emerging in the process.

Before coming to Leicester in 2021 I worked for a year as Professor of Sociology at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

Between 2015 and 2020 I worked as Professor of Sociology and Migration Studies at Kingston University London where I delivered SEXHUM (www.sexhum.org) a four-year (2016-2020) ERC-funded project on migrant sex workers’ understandings and experiences of agency and exploitation in Australia France New Zealand and the US.

Before then I worked for ten years for London Metropolitan University where between 2008 and 2010 I directed the 'Migrant Workers in the UK Sex Industry' ESRC project which produced 100 qualitative interviews and found that only a minority of people were trafficked.

Between 2006 and 2008 I delivered together with the other members of the research team the ‘Rhythms and Realities of Everyday Life' flagship project of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Immigration and Inclusion programme focusing on the relationship between long-term residents and new arrivals in six sites across the UK.

Employment: Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Adam Mickiewicz University.
Research interests: Polish migration in Europe, migration and health, access to health care, medical anthropology, memory of communist Poland.
Education: CEU, Budapest, Hungary.