Experts Database

I currently hold an ESRC scholarship for my PhD research at the University of Birmingham, UK. My project examines the experiences of social class of African international (SADC) students at South African universities. My research interests cover such topics as migration; regional cooperation; race, social class and inequality; aspiration and higher education; identity and belonging. My research focuses on Southern Africa and I have a long experience of living and working in the region. I'm also interested in (and have experience of) other regions of Africa as well as South Asia and the Caribbean.

I completed my BA in Development Studies with Politics (IR) and African Studies and MA in Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. I have previously held scholarships at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden and Sciences-Po in Paris, France. I also have a BA in Social Work and have experience of working with migrants.

Cathrine Talleraas is Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Researcher at the Christian Michelsen Institute (CMI). She holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Oslo. She is project coordinator and post-doctoral researcher in the project 'Effects of Externalisation: EU Migration Management in Africa and the Middle East"'(EFFEXT). In her PhD research, Talleraas studied the Norwegian welfare system’s encounter with people who lead transnational lives.

Talleraas is currently co-chair of the IMISCOE Standing Committee "Migration Politics and Governance" and board member in the Standing Committee "Reflexive Migration Studies". In 2017-2018 she coordinated the IMISCOE PhD-Network.

I am a social scientist (M.Soc.Sci. from University of Helsinki, major in Political History) and a criminologist (MA in Criminology from City University London). My main areas of expertise and interests are criminology, radicalisation, policing, knowledge management, terrorism and contemporary history, and ethics.

Kim Tao is the curator of post-Federation immigration at the Australian National Maritime Museum. Her research interests include migration, memory and material culture in museums, textile histories and histories of child migration. Kim has curated a range of award-winning exhibitions and digital projections. She was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to study partnerships between museums and culturally diverse communities in the UK, Canada and USA.

Nuria Targarona Rifa is a predoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Spain. She is currently working on the ERC Advanced Grant project PATCHWORK "A Network Science Approach to Social Cohesion in European Societies", where she does qualitative analysis of acquaintanceship networks and their relation with ethnic diversity and social cohesion. More specifically, she conducts mixed-method social network analysis (MMSNA) – including the use of visual tools and in-depth interviews informed by quantitative data – to explore the processes of categorisation and boundary drawing within personal networks. She is interested in studying the presence (or absence) and salience of ethnic and other types of social boundaries, how individuals contest or reinforce social categories imposed from above, the everyday strategies they use to maintain or create new boundaries between and within ethnic groups, and their responses to experiencing or witnessing racism and discrimination within their own personal networks.

Previously, her research has focused on migration-related issues including asylum and employment in the UK, Human Rights within immigration detention centres in Europe, and housing and migration. Methodologically, she has used qualitative research methods (conducting in-depth interviews, focus groups, and text analyses) and participatory action research. Her research has been published in journals such as Journal of Refugee Studies. She has also collaborated on the project ‘Social Scientists Against the Hostile Environment (SSAHE)’ by the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Refugees, Migration and Settlement.

She holds a degree in Political and Administration Sciences from Pompeu Fabra University (Spain), a Master´s Degree in Refugee Studies from the University of East London (UK), and a Postgraduate Diploma in Social Research Techniques from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Barcelona (UB), Spain.

She is a member of the Research Group on Fundamental and Oriented Anthropology (GRAFO) and the COALESCE Lab (Laboratory for Computational Analysis of Egonetworks, Social Cohesion, and Exclusion), both based at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

My research is focused on young children’s experiences of, and access to, education in linguistically and culturally diverse settings. My PhD research at the University of Sheffield explored the multimodal communicative practices of young children in a super-diverse, early years educational setting. My recent research explores how Voluntary and Community Organisations support asylum-seeing and refugee families with young children.