Experts Database

Sanam Vaghefi is a sociologist and qualitative researcher with a doctoral degree from the University of Victoria. Her research on the Iranian refugees in Canada was awarded the Best Student Paper Award by IRCC in 2021.
Her research interests include refugee migration, mental health, health inequities, migrant agency, digital ethnography and autoethnography. Her Ph.D. Project is entitled 'Exploring the Health and Migration Trajectories of Iranian Refugees in Canada'. Sanam is currently employed as a full-time faculty member at Capilano University, North Vancouver.

I graduated from the Immigration and Settlement Studies Master Program at Ryerson University. I hold a PhD in Social and Political Sciences by Iberoamericana University, Mexico. I am currently a full-time professor at the International Studies Department at Iberoamericana and teach in the Master in Migration Studies. I am also member of the Mexican National Research System and a founding partner of Laboratorio de Inivestigación Social Justicia en Movimiento, a Mexican NGO. My research interests focus on protection of nationals abroad, Diaspora-State relations, borders and migrant integration.

Areas of expertise
- Finnish party and government politics concerning immigration & immigrants
- Immigration: post-WWII evolution at the policy, judicial, and discursive levels in Finland and Western Europe
- Populist political communication

Research
Doc. Diss.: Finnish parties and immigration issues from the 1970s to the 2010s (2014-2019)

Post doc project: Securitization in authorities’ discourse and practice: Refugee reception in Finland, 1986–1995. (2019-2020, Kone Foundation)

Graduate Student at the KTH - Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Department of Philosophy and History, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment (2015). I am part of the Marie Sklodowska Curie ITN program in Environmental Humanities ENHANCE. I am interested in working at the intersection between Environmental History, Environmental Humanities and Migration Studies, touching also upon Cultural Heritage, Memory Studies, Oral History, Psychogeography, and Political Ecology.

Currently, I am working on my doctoral thesis, which is provisionally entitled: "Coal Lives. Italians and the Metabolism of Coal in Wallonia, Belgium".