Experts Database

The SmartMove2UK is a specialist immigration law firm with branches in India (Mumbai | Delhi | Bengaluru) led by a specialist Solicitor. Evolving from practicing exclusively in the areas of UK nationality and immigration law.
With more than a decade of Experience providing immigration and nationality services, we offer clients a personal and friendly, yet comprehensive solution to their immigration, travel and business needs.

Kevin Smets is research professor in film studies and cultural media studies. He studied cultural history (KU Leuven) and obtained a PhD in Film Studies and Visual Culture (University of Antwerp). His research focuses primarily on the intersections between migration, media and conflict, with a long research interest in Turkey. Kevin is co-director of the ECHO research group and since 2021 he leads the Reel Borders project, funded by an ERC Starting Grant. He also teaches the course ‘Film history’.

I am scholar of migration, transnational and translocal processes as linked to livelihoods, aspirations and identities. This research extends to climate change, rural-urban connectivities, societal engagement with new technologies, the role of diasporas and reconsiderations of the contested notion of development.

PhD student in Political and Social Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra under the supervision of Dr. Miriam Bradley and Dr. Margarita Petrova and as part of the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). Prior experience working as a humanitarian practitioner and researcher specialising in migration, security, and gender with ten years of experience working alongside migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees in Bangladesh, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Rwanda, Ukraine and the UK with UN agencies and NGOs.

Expertise in mixed method and qualitative participatory social research methods. Research interests focus on the securitisation of migration and its relationships to violence, discrimination, and gendered impacts as well as the everyday practices of migrant resistance.

I am Senior Research Fellow in Asylum and Migration at the University of Huddersfield. With extensive experience in the field of forced migration, my expertise has developed through long-term research and direct professional practice, service delivery and management with migrant and refugee organisations. My research focuses broadly on migration, asylum and refugee studies, with a particular focus on feminist narrative research and ethical dilemmas in feminist research. Often using creative, visual and participatory methodologies, I am particularly interested in how migration is understood and experienced by women. I have published and presented widely on these topics, including co-editing “Feminist Narrative Research: Opportunities and Challenges” (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). Contributing to many invited presentations at national and international workshops and conferences, my more recent work includes critical engagement with narratives of vulnerability and resistance.

I am one of the Research Leads, shared and alongside Dr. Anna Davidson and Dr. Grainne McMahon, on Feminist Spaces. This project brings together feminist, anti-racist, embodied practices of creating safe(r) spaces and arts activism to resignify space and to perform everyday acts of resistance with voice and action. This research has built a collaborative, capacity-releasing network by pairing up UK and European-based projects of resistance with a range of allied projects in less economically developed countries. Please see our website. We are currently working on Making Spaces which explores feminist responses and survival strategies in the Covid-19 pandemic. Our projects partners include the Racial Justice Network (West Yorkshire) and RAPAR (Manchester).

Dr Kelly Soderstrom is an academic staff member in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD thesis in Politics and International Relations (Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne) examines the role of state responsibilities in shaping the German government's response to the 2015 refugee crisis. Her current research investigates the drivers of interventions by sports-based NGOs in asylum governance.

She holds a Bachelors degree (cum laude) in Political Science / International Relations from Carleton College (USA) and a Masters degree (distinction) in International and European Politics from the University of Edinburgh (UK). Her research interests include asylum governance, European integration and EU politics, NGOs, and sustainability/CSR. Between 2017-2022, she was a Research Partner with the Jean Monnet Erasmus+ network Comparative Network on Refugee Externalisation Policies (CONREP). In 2018, she was awarded a graduate fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.