Experts Database

Isabella (Bella) is finishing her final module for the European Masters of Migration and Intercultural Relations (EMMIR) as an intern for Refugees Welcome International at their branch in Rome, Italy, working mainly with domestic hospitality projects. EMMIR is a unique Afro-European Erasmus Mundus program with seven consortium members in seven different countries between Europe and Africa. Following EMMIR, Bella will pursuit her PhD in Information Science and Technology at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.

Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology (Complutense University Madrid). Her research fields are the Migration Studies (Latin American migration, Andean migration, transnational perspective and gender, new mobilities and new Spanish migration, asylum and gender) and Development Studies. She has conducted fieldwork in Ecuador, Cape Vert, Spain and the UK. She has been Visiting Scholar at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), FLACSO-Ecuador, Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law and the Institute Latin American Studies (Freie Universität Berlin) . Furthermore, she has been Prometeo Researcher 2013-2014 in Ecuador. Finally, she has published five books authored and co-authored on migration and development and more than 30 national and international publications specialized (scientific articles and book chapters).

I am a social and political psychologist working through critical approches (anticolonial, CRT, liberation psychology among others). My research focus on collective action, identity, migration, discrimination by prioritizing a research praxis from below, through lay epistemologies of oppressed but resisting people and communities. I refused to be fully encapsulated in the neoliberal university system. Instead, through scientific affiliations, I try to conduct independent research with small academic grants. I also do translations to survive economically and to support my communities.

Adriana Costa Santos is Researcher member of CESIR (Université Saint-Louis, Brussels) and PhD student. Her research projects are in the areas of contemporary migrations, public action and collective mobilisation. She holds an Anthropology Master from Université Libre de Bruxelles (2019) with a research on Downward social mobility among Syrian refugees in Brussels, and has been founder and coordinator on the field of migration projects in Brussels with BxlRefugees since 2017.

Ms Cottone is currently Ph.D. candidate in international public law and international relations at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She has a degree in Law and is specialised in the international protection of human rights and the law of the sea. In her academic research she adopts an integral approach to protect and guarantee individual rights focused on reinforcing interstate cooperation on security and governance of human mobility as a fundamental measure to combat transnational crime.

Since August 2021 she is Research Officer for the IOM's COMPASS Programme based at IOM Headquarters, Geneva and covering 14 countries (Afghanistan, Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Tunisia and Sudan). Prior to this, she supported the International Migration Law Unit (IML) at IOM Headquarters, Geneva. In November 2018, she has joined the Libya mission of IOM as Research Officer, establishing and coordinating the Research and Policy Programme. With IOM she worked also in West Africa being based in Niger, working on preventing irregular migration and supporting awareness raising campaigns against radicalization and violent extremism. In the Horn of Africa in Djibouti, she managed IOM Mixed Migration program and the Yemeni crisis response. She is former Associate Expert for the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), with which she served in Algeria and at Headquarters in Turin and Rome, focusing on security, counter terrorism and transnational organized crime and human mobility. Cottone worked on refugee protection with UNHCR in Spain.

Out of the United Nations system, Linda served the Italian government through legal advisory and research on social policies for the integration of regular migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, as well as victims of trafficking in persons.