Experts Database

Biography

Janroj Yilmaz Keles is a Senior Research Fellow in Politics at Middlesex University Law School and a Visiting Fellow at London School of Economics (LSE), researching peace and conflict, gender, political violence, ethnicity and nationalism, statelessness, migration, diasporas and international relations, social movements and media and political communication. He is also module leader of International Politics of the Middle East and North Africa, Dissertation and co-lecture of the modules Politics of Globalisation, Post-Brexit Europe: Transformation and Challenges and Migration Theories and Approaches. He also contributed the following modules: Radicalization and Terrorism: Problems and Answers and Theories of International Relations.

Keles has extensive experience in international education. He studied in Turkey, Germany and United Kingdom. He received his PhD in Sociology and Communications from Brunel University. His PhD thesis, entitled "Media, Diaspora and Conflict: Nationalism and Identity amongst Kurdish and Turkish Migrants in Europe" is an interdisciplinary and comparative cross-national study based on a sociologically informed analysis of mass communication, national-ethnic identity, multiple belonging and inter-group relations/conflict within diasporic and/or transnational settings.

He is one of the Co-investigators for the GCRF Hub – Gender, Justice and Security led by the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security in partnership with Middlesex University and other 17 institutions around the world (£15.2 million) (Middlesex University leads Migration & Displacement, £2.6 million, with Professor Eleonore Kofman, Professor Brad Blitz, Dr Janroj Keles and Dr Neelam Raina)

He has been awarded a research grant with Dr Neelam Raina for a study on Post-Conflict Craft Heritage of Iraq and Kurdistan – A scoping study of Samawah and Erbil, funded by Nahren Project, Art and Humanities Research Council and GCFR (£30.000). His fourteen years of experience in researching within higher education has comprised different roles in multiple research projects across disciplines ranging from media and sociology to international relations. Consequently, he has an interdisciplinary and cross-national comparative research background. He has a proven track record of securing external research funding, having contributed as a Research Fellow or co-investigator to projects funded by the ESRC (£360,000), the Horizon 2020 - EU Commission (319,456.00) the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (Clark and Keles, £60,000), and the OECD ( Dodd and Keles, £5000). As a Principal Investigator, he received small grants from the International Organisation for Migration to undertake research on undocumented migrants in the UK (£5000) and from the Council of The British Institute for the Study of Iraq for my research project on “Transnational Mobility and Digital Social Networking (£8000). Moreover, he received a Newton Fund to research the role of transnational entrepreneurship in post-conflict developing economies (Kurdistan-Iraq, £3650).

Previously he worked as an Ethnographic Fieldworker, Compas, University of Oxford, a Lecturer, teaching sociology and media studies at the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University and an Associate Lecturer at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck. He also worked at Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University where he worked on a number of cross-national and interdisciplinary research projects on migration, visual and work sociology, civic engagement and participation, forced labour, human trafficking, precarious work, labour movement and trade union, community, identity, ethnicity, racism and globalization.

While he was doing his PhD, he has been part of a research team to explore 'Legitimising the discourses of radicalisation: Political violence in the new media ecology' for the University of Warwick, worked for Harvard University in London on the political participation and religious integration of Muslims in Europe after 9/11 and participated in the MIGSYS research project (Professor Russell King) to examine the growing diversity of migrant types, nationalities, ethnicities, cultures, languages and motivations, especially in "super-diversity" within the urban settings such as London (see King at el 2008).

He has published several single-authored and co-authored articles in peer-reviewed high-quality journals including Journal of Political Geography, Journal for Ethnic and Migration Studies, The Sociological Review, Antipode, Urban Studies, Middle East Journal of Culture & Communication, Industrial Law Journal, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal. Work, Employment and Society.

My monograph Media, Conflict and Diaspora (I.B. Tauris, 2015), was well-received. In addition, his feature articles were published in University World News, Open Democracy, Foreign Policy, European Union Foreign Affairs Journal and Chartist

He has organized a number of policy-oriented workshops with various stakeholders (government, NGOs, INGOs, EU officials, policymakers, community and business organisations) in the UK, EU and the Middle East.

He supervises master's and doctoral students and acts as an external examiner for the program and PhD theses.

He was an editor of Work, Employment and Society, a leading international peer-reviewed journal of the British Sociological Association (2018-2022).

Follow him at https://twitter.com/janroj

Ilan Kelman http://www.ilankelman.org and Twitter/Instagram @IlanKelman is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England and a Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. His overall research interest is linking disasters and health, including the integration of climate change into disaster research and health research. That covers three main areas: (i) disaster diplomacy and health diplomacy http://www.disasterdiplomacy.org ; (ii) island sustainability involving safe and healthy communities in isolated locations http://www.islandvulnerability.org ; and (iii) risk education for health and disasters http://www.riskred.org

I am a sociologist and I work as an Assistant Professor at the Sociology Department of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

My research broadly falls under the areas of ethnic and migration studies, sociology of education and family, as well as youth sociology, with a focus on social inequalities. I am particularly interested in how ethnic, social class and gender inequalities are (re)produced or overcome applying a comparative lens.Currently I am working on a research project concerning the parenting practices in diverse settings among caregivers with and without a migration background.

Nina Khamsy is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. Nina conducts multisited and multimodal ethnographic research on the role of digital resources in migration on the so-called "Balkan route". Her current project is entitled 'Scales of mobility of Afghan migrant youth in the digital era' (2019-2023).

Themrise N Khan is an Independent development professional with over 20 years of experience in international development, social policy (developing countries) and global migration. She has worked with several bi-lateral and multi-lateral agencies, and including, but not limited to; DFID UK, Global Affairs Canada, the International Labour Organization, the UN Agency for Migration, the International Centre for Migration Policy Development and the World Bank Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD).

Her main expertise lies in leading qualitative thematic and policy research studies. She has published both academically and as a research practitioner, including for the University of Ottawa Press and the ILO, on issues ranging from development aid intervention in fragile states, to female labour migration in Pakistan. Her interest in migration lies in, among other areas, understanding transnational citizenship, South-South migration regimes and encouraging scholarship in migration research and policy by the South, for the South. She has recently begun a career as an emerging academic teaching international development and migration at Habib University, Karachi, Pakistan.