Experts Database

Irene Peano trained as a social anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, where she received her PhD in 2011. She has previously held post-doctoral positions at the University of Bologna, where she held a Marie Curie Intra-European fellowship, and at the University of Bucharest. For more than fifteen years, she has been engaged in research on the exploitation of migrants, with a specific focus on sex work and agricultural labour, and on forms of resistance to labour and migration regimes, to which she is actively committed. In relation to such themes, she also carries out genealogical, historical and archival research. Irene has done field research in Nigeria, Italy and Romania. At ICS, she was part of the COLOUR Project (The Colour of Labour: the racialized Lives of Migrants - PI Cristiana Bastos), before holding a position as Associate Researcher.

Luicy Pedroza specializes in comparative citizenship studies. She is a political scientist and was originally trained in International Relations, but her work engages avidly with other disciplines of the social sciences that intersect in the study of migration and citizenship, especially political sociology, legal studies and political theory. Dr. Luicy Pedroza is a Research Professor at the Center for International Studies of El Colegio de México. From 2014 to 2020, she worked as a Research Fellow of the GIGA (Berlin office) on two major research projects: first, a project on the diasporic policies of Latin American and Caribbean states (see "Polities Beyond Borders..." and EMIX), and second, a research project on how migration policies distribute mobility, residence and citizenship rights for both immigrants and emigrants, across world regions (see "Every Immigrant is an Emigrant: How Migration Policies Shape the Paths to Integration -IMISEM" ). Pedroza's research has received awards from the German Political Science Association (DVPW) and the American Political Science Association (APSA). She is the author of "Citizenship Beyond Nationality: Immigrants' Right to Vote Across the World " (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Konrad Pędziwiatr - holds PhD in Social Sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), MA in European Studies from the University of Exeter (UK) and in Sociology from the Jagiellonian University (Poland). He is a principal investigator and coordinator of the Multiculturalism and Migration Observatory, professor in the Department of International Relations at the Cracow University of Economics, Deputy Director of the Center for Advanced Studies of Population and Religion (CASPAR) and an associate researcher in the Centre for Migration Research (CMR) at the University of Warsaw. He is author/co-author of numerous publications on religion and ethnicity in the processes of migration, migration policy, Islam and Muslims in Europe, and the politicization of Islam in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa including the monographs: "From Reception to Integration of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Poland"-2022, "Migrations and Covid-19" - 2022, "Immigrants in Krakow" - 2021, "Transformation of Islamisms in Egypt and Tunisia in the shadow of the Arab Spring" - 2019, “Polish Migration Policy” - 2015, "The New Muslim Elites in European Cities" - 2010 and "From Islam of Immigrants to Islam of Citizens" - 2007, as well as, academic articles in such prestigious journals as for example: the Patterns of Prejudice, Journal of Ethnic and Migrations Studies, Social Compass and Gender, Place and Culture.

Experience in qualitative interdisciplinary research on culture and power structures with a focus of analysis in the intersectionality of oppressions they produce in groups and territories. The main fields of work and capacity building experience are in gender, international migrations, youth political thinking and movements, and collective emotions for social change. Author of Emotional Communities: Affectivities and collective action in Grassroots Organizations in Bogota (for download here: https://hdl.handle.net/10656/11194). Currently looking to expand the field of action in research or capacity building consultancies or projects in organizations that support actions that promote social and gender justice. Also interested in taking part in design thinking teams aiming at the social, political, and educational transformation of contexts and communities.

Lotte Pelckmans is an anthropologist who has been working on social mobility, displacement, social media, nomadism and rights at the crossroads of (post-)slavery and migration studies, with a focus on francophone West Africa. Currently I am employed as associate professor at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, Copenhagen University.

I studied and worked at Leiden University (Anthropology, African Studies Centre, Institute for History) and was associate professor at Nijmegen University (Anthropology and Development Studies). I obtained an EU co-fund scholarship for a year in French academia (CEAF, EHESS) and worked as a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (2015-2016), Copenhagen, Denmark.

In 2016 I co-edited the documentary movie ‘River Nomads’, which is about the transnational mobility of nomadic fishermen in West Africa (Nigeria, Niger, Mali). From 2017 I work at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (https://amis.ku.dk) part of the SAXO institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2018 I combined my lecturer position there with a postdoc in the project readingslavery.au.dk at Comparative Literature, Aarhus University. From 2018, I started working as an editorial board member of the recently established journal ‘Slaveries and Post-Slaveries’, based at CIRESC in France. In 2019 I was a senior Heinz Heinen fellow at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), Germany. The fellowship was about testimonies for legal court cases, in contemporary ‘post-slavery’ societies of French West Africa. From early 2020, I started working as a Co-I on a collaborative GCRF/UKRI UK funded research project, about Protracted Displacements of People with slave status in Mali, West Africa, while based at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, Copenhagen University.

Michaela Pelican is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. She is also the Speaker of the international research unit 'The production and reproduction of social inequalities‘ and the Director of the international research cluster ‘Conflict-Induced Displacement and Socio-Economic Resilience: Learning From Neglected Conflicts in Cameroon and Myanmar’.
Michaela’s thematic foci are South-South mobility, social inequality, ethnicity, conflict, and research methodology. Her regional focus is on Sub-Saharan Africa (in particular Cameroon), the United Arab Emirates and Southern China.

Saara Pellander is the Director of the Migration Institute of Finland. She is a Doctor of Social Sciences and holds the title of Associate Professor in Political History at the University of Helsinki. She is the PI for the Academy of Finland funded INDEFI project on deportability and family ties. She has worked and published on issues related to the regulation of cross-border intimacies and family reunification especially from the perspectives of policies and their implementation, as well as media representations of (forced) migration and related activism.