Experts Database

I am Associate Professor and lecturer. My research focusses on migration and mobility, particularly international migration. My current research relates to international labour migration, through the example of Thai berry pickers in Sweden, which has been analysed ethnographically from a transnational and translocal perspective. I have also performed register based studies, analysing labour market careers and internal migration of international migrants in Sweden. My latest research project relates to lifestyle migration through the example of downshifting and voluntary simplicity, including how they affect migration patterns and the relationship to place. Often, my research adopts a rural perspective.

Lauren Heidbrink is an anthropologist and associate professor of human development at the California State University, Long Beach. She is author of Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests (University of Pennsylvania Press 2014), an ethnography on unaccompanied child migration and detention in the United States. Her second book Migranthood: Youth in a new era of deportation (Stanford University Press 2020; published in Spanish with UNAM-CIMSUR 2021) examines the deportation of Indigenous youth in Central America and its enduring impacts on young people, their families and transnational communities. Heidbrink’s research has been supported by a National Science Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. She was awarded the Fulbright Schuman 70th Anniversary Scholar Award to conduct comparative research on child migration in Greece, Italy, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. She is co-founder and editor of Youth Circulations, a nexus for research, art and activism dedicated to examining the real and imagined circulations of global youth.

Experienced social researcher with a background in politics and international relations as well as regional experience in the Western Balkans, particularly post-conflict issues in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Applying qualitative methods to understand the global interactions of political organisations with a special focus on transnational networks resulting from migration.

Dr. Christiane Heimann is a research fellow at the Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training and at the German Marshall Fund of the US. She holds expertise as academic researcher and policy analyst in various topics of migration and integration. In these areas she has worked and published on EU policies, multi-level governance, labor migration, international recruitment and labor market integration, local policies in metropolises, smaller cities and rural areas, city networks and the design of funding as well as data management. Her work was released by international academic journals and book series. Besides, she has conducted studies and reports for the European Commission, European Union Fundamental Rights Agency and the German Institute for Human Rights as well as for foundations, such as Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and Robert Bosch Stiftung.
As a researcher and lecturer, she worked at the Institute for the Studies of Societal Issues at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), the University of Hildesheim and the University of Bamberg in Germany, the migration research group GRITIM at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (Spain) and at the Migration Research Unit at the University College London (UK), Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (Germany) and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). During her PhD, she was a scholarship holder of the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation. Before, she studied European Studies in Social Sciences at Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg (Germany) and the Universidad de Salamanca (Spain).

Frank Heins has been a senior researcher at the Italian National Research Council Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies since 2001. He is a geographer and demographer. His research interests are focused on the territorial aspects of the structures and dynamics of demographic and socio-economic processes, especially internal and international migration. His current projects are the study of family types and their dynamics, research on various aspects of internal migration in Italy and the observation of residential segregation.

Zenia Hellgren is doctor of sociology and senior researcher at GRITIM-UPF (The interdisciplinary research group on immigration), Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain. Currently she is Principal Investigator of the EU funded research-action project AGREP (Action program for effective reporting of anti-gypsyism and discrimination).
Her research on immigration, integration and diversity engages with key concepts and issues in social and political theorizing such as agency, citizenship and inclusion, institutions and regimes, stakeholders, (in)equality, discrimination, racialization, precariousness, gender and intersectionality. Since she completed her PhD at Stockholm University in 2012, she has won four competitive calls (three at the EU level and one at the national, Swedish level) for research projects that she has herself designed and proposed. The empirical dimension is essential in her scholarship: she largely conducts qualitative field studies, often applying ethnographic methods to collect extensive data. In her three most recent, EU funded research projects, she has developed a methodological approach inspired by Participatory Action Research (PAR). This means emphasizing the active role of the researcher as part of the social reality that is being studied, with the objective of contributing to social change beyond merely interpreting the empirical findings.
The translation of contemporary political and social dynamics into theorizing is a cornerstone of her work, which she has published in numerous peer-reviewed academic journals and edited volumes. She also strives to strengthen the interrelation between academia and the social and political spheres, developing contacts with policy-making actors and representatives of the third sector throughout her trajectory as a researcher, and disseminating her research also through non-academic publications in formats such as policy papers and reports, and media articles. This is guided by her perspective that research should be useful not only at the scientific level, but also for society in general, and for the often vulnerable groups – migrants and minorities – that constitute her “study objects” in particular.

Zenia Hellgren currently teaches two courses at the Pompeu Fabra University: “Diversity, Discrimination and Citizenship” at the Master in migration studies programme, and “Immigration and the labour market” (in Spanish) at the undergraduate program in Labour Relations. Formerly, she taught sociological theory and qualitative methods at Stockholm University. She is also a thesis supervisor at the PhD and Master programmes at the Department of Political and Social Sciences (UPF).

Phd Sociology

Sophie is a migration policy researcher with a PhD in international labour migration and human rights law from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is currently a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge. Her main research interests include temporary labour migration, gender and migration, and human / labour rights, with a focus on women migrant domestic workers in the Asia Pacific region.

I am an ESRC-funded doctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow. My thesis focuses on the political and institutional effects of long-term remittance dependency in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. I am associated with the ERC's MOBSANCT research project and LSE IDEAS foreign policy think-tank. Prior to doctoral studies, I completed an MSc in International Social and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.