Experts Database

With over 15 years of dedicated experience in humanitarian work, I have been a refugee practitioner originally from Syria and based in Germany since 2012. My work involves safeguarding refugee and migration rights and providing counseling on family reunification and integration matters. I am a member of the Network for Dialogue at KAICIID, facilitating integration through interreligious and intercultural dialogue. For the past two years, I have been conducting a short study on the Nest Programme SHARE legal pathway, promoting education, and advocating for diversity and inclusion across Europe and Central Asia.

Moritz Mähr is Junior Fellow of the IFN at the WBKolleg at the University of Bern and digital project manager at Stadt.Geschichte.Basel at University of Basel. He studied history and philosophy of knowledge, computer science, and banking & finance in Zurich and Berlin. From 2018 to 2022, he was a research assistant at the Chair of the History of Technology at ETH Zurich and wrote a dissertation on the digitization of migration authorities in Switzerland in the 1960s. The study was part of the SNSF-funded project Trading Zones. His research interests include science & technology studies, digital humanities, and history of computing. He is an advocate of open science, open access, and open source.

My research straddles criminology sociology and anthropology and focuses on the experiences and representations of criminalised marginalised and stigmatised migrant groups.

My work is qualitative and based on an ethnographic long term engagement with the people and communities with whom I undertake my research.

I am also a filmmaker and my films complement my academic writing and emerge through the collaboration with migrants and sex workers and by expressing their perspectives priorities and needs.

I believe collaborative filmmaking is a way to create knowledge together with people who are directly concerned and to make sure that they own the terms of their representations.

My ambition is that the films and publications that result from my work will reach out further from the academic world into public and political debates and that they will contribute to changing policies according to the priorities and needs of their protagonists.

In the future I would like to continue my work on migration by focusing on the relationship with climate change the transition to green societies and the displacements and mobilities that are emerging in the process.

Before coming to Leicester in 2021 I worked for a year as Professor of Sociology at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

Between 2015 and 2020 I worked as Professor of Sociology and Migration Studies at Kingston University London where I delivered SEXHUM (www.sexhum.org) a four-year (2016-2020) ERC-funded project on migrant sex workers’ understandings and experiences of agency and exploitation in Australia France New Zealand and the US.

Before then I worked for ten years for London Metropolitan University where between 2008 and 2010 I directed the 'Migrant Workers in the UK Sex Industry' ESRC project which produced 100 qualitative interviews and found that only a minority of people were trafficked.

Between 2006 and 2008 I delivered together with the other members of the research team the ‘Rhythms and Realities of Everyday Life' flagship project of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Immigration and Inclusion programme focusing on the relationship between long-term residents and new arrivals in six sites across the UK.

Employment: Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Adam Mickiewicz University.
Research interests: Polish migration in Europe, migration and health, access to health care, medical anthropology, memory of communist Poland.
Education: CEU, Budapest, Hungary.

Soumaya Majdoub's doctoral research project is about migration and Malthusian thinking. This research project fits in the broader interdisciplinary research project ‘Cities & Newcomers’ at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). The focus of this project lies on the relationship between perceived population growth and pressure, (economic) development and international migrations on the one hand and the political and public discourse about migration on the other.

She holds a Master’s degree in Media, Democracy & Journalism (VUB) and has a background in Communication Studies (UAntwerpen). In her Master’s thesis, she analyzed the theme of political representation of minorities, the mechanisms behind the process of political recruitment and power elite formation.

She has worked for a number of years as an advisor on urban issues including labor market integration, entrepreneurship, diversity and inclusion.

Key research interests include: economic development, migration policy, population growth, urbanization, migration & urban planning

Nassim is known for her work as an expert on return and reintegration, and more broadly on durable solutions to displacement, migrant aspirations, and cross border mobility. Over the last two decades, she has worked, as an academic and a research professional to give voice to under-represented groups and displaced populations, who find themselves caught in the hopes of migration and the despair of displacement and the difficulties of forced returns and deportations.

Nassim is based in the contexts that she studies - having lived between 2007-2014 in Afghanistan and since 2014 in Kenya and leads a team of researchers across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Her geographic and thematic portfolio of work has led her to work with a network of changemakers across the “North-South'' divide.

She is a Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand, the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, and the Université Houphouet Boigny. Institute for Good Governance, Development, and Foresight (IGDP).

Nassim has published 31 academic and policy articles and led over 200 studies on migration including the more recent publications: South Sudan’s Decades of Displacement: Understanding Return and Questioning Reintegration, and Tipping Points to Turning Points - How Can Programmes and Policies Better Respond to the risks of Child Trafficking and Exploitation on the Central Mediterranean Route?

In 2015, she was nominated by the Norwegian Refugee Council for the prestigious Nansen Refugee Award in recognition of her sterling work on behalf of Afghanistan’s displaced population. Nassim can also be seen giving interviews and participates in panels for media including the Associated Press, Radio France, and TV5 Monde.

Nassim holds a PhD in International Relations from Sciences Po Paris, France, a MA in International Affairs and Development Studies and a BA from Cornell University, USA.

I am interested in migration and development issues especially migrant workers and refugee issues. my current research about unprocedural migrant workers in Indonesia: pattern and causes.

Anouk Malboeuf recently completed her master's in Refugee protection and forced migration studies at the University of London. Her research project focused on Development-induced displacement as a root factor for human trafficking in the Greater Mekong. As an environmental geographer, she is also interested in Climate change and environmental induce displacements, issues of statelessness caused by environmental and climate displacement, resilience, and adaptation.