Experts Database

Professor of Political Sociology

I am a senior researcher at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. My research focusses on international migration and urban developments and, more broadly, on the interrelation of materiality and sociality in late modern societies. I habilitated at the Department of Geography, University of Bremen, Germany, in 2019 (venia legendi “Humangeographie”) and obtained my PhD at Bielefeld University, Germany, in 2013. In 2017, I was a Visiting Academic at the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK. My most recent book is on the nexus of migration, materility and identity ("Migration, Materialität und Identität. Verortungen zwischen Hier und Dort", published in German in 2020, Steiner Verlag).

Lea Müller-Funk is currently a Research Fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, where her research focuses on migration aspirations and drivers in (forced) migration, migration and refugee governance, and diaspora politics with a geographical focus on the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Previously, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. She earned a joint PhD in Comparative Politics and Arabic Studies (summa cum laude) from the Centre des Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris and the Department for Near Eastern Studies at Vienna University in 2016. Methodologically, she applies different approaches including in-depth and life history interviews, survey research, mixed methods, content analysis, and online ethnography.

Before her PhD, she was a trainee at the Department of the European Council and the Council of the European Union at the Austrian Foreign Ministry (2010-2011). She attended Vienna University (BA in Political Science, 2009; Magister in Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2010), the Institut National des Langues et Cultures Orientales in Paris (2007/2008), and Sciences Po Paris (MA in Comparative Politics / Middle East and Muslim World, 2010). Lea has held research affiliations to the Institut français du Proche-Orient Beirut (2018), the Migration Reseach Center at Koç University (2018), Nuffield College (2017), the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (2012) and the American University Beirut (2009).

I am lecturer in Sociology with an interest in how states categorise and treat migrant populations.

Prof. Dr Sybille Münch is guest researcher at the Center for the Study of Democracy at Leuphana University in Lüneburg and currently acts as Professor of Political Science at Hildesheim University. Her research focuses on interpretive approaches to policy analysis as well as urban and migration research.

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at Trinity College Dublin. My research is at the intersection of applied microeconomics and development economics.

Much of my research uses GIS data and self-collected data to investigate the impacts of internal displacement on the population displaced and their host communities. For instance, my work tackles questions such as Do forced displaced population flows have long-term social participation effects on their host communities? or How does forced displacement affect the timing of marriage, particularly, early marriage? and If traditional marriage payment norms influence such a relationship?

During my Phd I have worked as a consultant for the UNDP. Previously, I worked for the United Nations and the OECD.

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology II of UNED, Madrid. I have been a visiting researcher at the VU University of Amsterdam, University of Mannheim, University of Oxford, and UvA University of Amsterdam. My research has been published in journals such as Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Migration Review, European Sociological Review, Work, Employment and Society, and Comparative Migration Studies. Since 2018 I have been Secretary of the Research Committee CI-25 (Sociology of Migrations) of the Spanish Federation of Sociology (FES).