Experts Database

Jill Ahrens is a Scientific Project Manager and Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Department for Migration and Globalisation at the University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria. She also is a Research Associate at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research focuses on international student mobilities, onward migration, transnationalism and irregular migration.

In the past she has worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Gender & Diversity Hub at Utrecht University and held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University. Her PhD research at the University of Sussex on the topic of intra-European onward mobilities of Nigerian migrants was supported by a research grant within the Marie-Curie INTEGRIM initial training network (EU FP7), as well as the German Academic Exchange Service and the Research Council of Norway.

Prior to that, she worked as a researcher at the University of Sussex on two projects related to international student mobility (funded by BIS and HEFCE) and the Migrations between Africa and Europe longitudinal survey (MAFE). She has held visiting appointments at Bielefeld University (2011), University of Bonn (2013), University of Oslo (2013-14), University of Lisbon (2014-15) and Zayed University in Dubai (2017-18).

Damla Bayraktar Aksel is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bahcesehir University (Istanbul) and a Research Associate at Migration Research Center at Koc University (MiReKoc). She previously held the position of postdoctoral researcher and coordinator at MiReKoc. She received her PhD in Political Science and International Relations from Koc University. Aksel holds an M.A. degree in Public Policy at Sciences Po Paris and B.A. degree in Sociology from Galatasaray University. Her research focuses on international migration, migration governance, transnationalism, diasporas, irregular migration, EU-Turkey relations in relation to international migration. Aksel is the author of "Home States and Homeland Politics: Interactions between the Turkish State and its Emigrants in France and the United States" (2019).

METU-Sociology 2013

Ankara University- Migration Studies MA

Boğaziçi University- Sociology MA

Currently postdoctoral fellow at LaSSP, Sciences Po Toulouse.

Armando Aliu is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of the International and Political Studies, Centre for International Studies and Development (CISAD) at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland). He is a Member of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), International Migration Research Network (IMISCOE), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Law Society of England and Wales, Max Planck Alumni Association (MPAA), European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS), MIT-SOLVE, and the Western Balkans Migration Network (WB-MIGNET). He holds a Ph.D. Degree (Summa Cum Laude) from the ICU, Department of International Commerce and the European Union Law. His Ph.D. dissertation is entitled “Competence, Migration Governance and Collaboration in the Balkans and Turkey: Migration and Refugees Issues from the European Union Law Perspective.” He holds a Master's degree in European Studies from the University of Hamburg in Germany. His M.A. dissertation is entitled “Controlling Migration and Hybrid Model: A Comparison of Western Balkans and North African Countries.” In his dissertation, he argued migration flows and asylum issues in the frame of empirical, analytical, and political comparisons of Western Balkans and North African countries.
Dr. Aliu was a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Postgraduate Scholar at the University of Heidelberg in Germany (2011-2014). Based on one year contract (2011-2012) he was a DAAD investigator in the "Schumpeter Project: Constitutional Reasoning in Europe" conducted at Max-Planck-Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. At the institute, he also worked independently on Hybridity Project: Innovative Governance, and Controlling Migration.
In 2017, he was a Visiting Study Fellow in the Department of International Development, IMI at the University of Oxford. He has over 10 years of research experience and over 100 scientific publications including peer-reviewed journal articles, congress proceedings, edited books, book chapters, project proposals, and so on. Since 2012, he has been serving as peer/reviewer for SSCI, SCI, A&H, ESCI indexed journals. Since 2014, he has been serving as a SEDIA funding & tender expert and senior ECAS EU project referee for the European Commission. He is an expert in the EU Project Writing Techniques, the EU Projects Evaluation Criteria, and Project Management Institute (PMI) Global Project Management Standards.
His research interests contain; politics and administration, migration and refugee studies, asylum, criminal justice, human rights, ethics, UN SDGs, European studies, EU law, governance, WTO law, stakeholder approach, and so on.
He is Associate Editor of Cogent Social Sciences and Frontiers in Political Science, Article Editor of Sage Open, and Editorial Board member of the International Journal of Business Policy & Governance, Social Sciences Advisory Board Member of Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and Roster member of UN Migration Research Hub and EU Mieux Initiative. He is an Outstanding/Recognised Peer of Artificial Intelligence Review (Springer); Academy of Management (AoM); Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations (Brill - Nijhoff & Lynne Rienner Publishers); Journal of International Migration and Integration (Springer); Cambridge Journal of Science & Policy (University of Cambridge, CJSP); Journal of Travel Medicine (Oxford University Press); Globalization and Health (Springer); Innovation and Impact (De Gruyter Open); Economia Politica (Springer); SAGE Open (SAGE Publications); International Journal of Intercultural Relations (Elsevier); Journal of Migration Health (Elsevier); International Economics and Economic Policy (Springer); Tourism Management (Elsevier); Annals of Tourism Research (Elsevier); Current Issues in Tourism (Taylor and Francis – Routledge); International Journal of Tourism Research (Wiley); Cogent Social Sciences (Taylor and Francis); Cogent Education (Taylor and Francis); MDPI Social Sciences; International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health; Healthcare (MDPI); Administrative Sciences (MDPI); Sustainability (MDPI); Journal of Personalized Medicine; Journal of Risk and Financial Management; Genealogy (MDPI); Societies (MDPI); Energies (MDPI); Journal of open innovation; Tourism and Management Studies (Algarve, PL). He was an associate member in the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement and a CUSPE fundraiser at the University of Cambridge. In 2021, he worked as an International Consultant and PostDoc researcher at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) – United Nations Migration Agency. In Spring 2023, he has been awarded a LIAS Fellowship and affiliated with the KU Leuven as Visiting Fellow at the Leuven Institute for Advanced Study (LIAS) and Visiting Scholar at the KU Leuven Faculty of Medicine in Leuven (Belgium).

Magali N. Alloatti is a consultant for IOM Brazil, worked as an analyist for the UNDP (2023), as an Officer for Political Relations at Global Affairs Canada (2022) and it has been an associated researcher at the State Observatory for Migrations (SC) since 2013. She was postdoctoral fellow CAPES DAAD at Hamburg University (2019-2020) and previously a postdoctoral fellow at the State Observatory for Migrations in Santa Catarina at the Laboratory for Gender and Family relations (UDESC) (2018-2019). Her work has been published at Gender, Work & Organization, Sociologia Política, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Andvances in Gender Research, among others. She has recently joined the Standing Committee Immigration, Immigrants and Labour Markets in Europe (IMISCOE)
She was invited as an expert panelist by the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute (Florence) (2020); also as an international lecturer at the Center for Gender Studies, Karlstad University (2020), an as International Guest Professor at the sociology department in Bielefeld University teaching on international migration, ethnic economy, gender, race and ethnicity (2017). Has been invited to conferences organized by the International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFJP), the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) (2018,2021, 2022) and at the BGHS in Bielefeld. She was also a scholarship recepient from Women Deliver as a gender advocate participating at the conference in Vancouver in 2019.
She graduated in sociology from the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina, in 2010; got her master’s degree in 2013 and her PhD in sociology in 2017, both at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Her PhD was obtain in collaboration with University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) at the Sociology Department and The Center for the Study of International Migration during 2015- 2016 with a scholarship from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

I am a postdoctoral research fellow in migration sociology at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore. I am also affiliated with Georgetown University Qatar, as a visiting Scholar in Residence. My work focuses on migration politics, diversity management and citizenship regimes in the ArabGulf states, with a particular focus on Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) & Saudi Arabia. My postdoctoral research examines the professional pathways of long-term (Arab and South Asian) ‘expats’ in Qatar, in particular those with middle-class backgrounds, and the ways in which they navigate differential inclusion, semi-enforced temporality, and infra-national belonging.

I hold a joint PhD degree from the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and KU Leuven (Belgium). My doctoral work addressed the labor migration of highly-skilled EU nationals with second-generation, Maghrebi-Muslim backgrounds engaging in alternative social mobilities by moving overseas.

One of my longstanding research foci is the social, cultural, and economic development of the Gulf Arab states that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in the energy-rich Persian Gulf region. My broader research interests include the anthropology of migration, labour sociology, global cities, ethnography of the state, skilled and white-collar work, social mobility and transnational class making, the political economy of race, political Islam, sectarianism, and energy politics in Europe and the larger Middle East.

My work has appeared in such journals as the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, Mobilities, Middle East Critique, Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, and Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP).

Contact: Jaafar.alloul@ntu.edu.sg

Silvia Almenara Niebla works as postdoctoral researcher at Communication Studies Department (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). She works on the ERC project Reel Borders lead by prof. Kevin Smets. She obtained her PhD in gender and migration studies (Universidad de La Laguna, 2020, extraordinary doctoral prize) with a study on transnational belonging and media practices among Sahrawi refugees from a gender perspective. She is vice-chair of the Diaspora, Migration and the Media section of ECREA.

Faime Alpagu studied Sociology in Istanbul and Vienna. Her dissertation project was funded by a doctoral scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and she received the 2016 Dissertation Award for Research on Migration from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research has been further supported by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), the IFK Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften and City of Vienna.

Tunay Altay is a PhD candidate in Humboldt University’s Department of Diversity and Social Conflict. His research and teaching focuses on race critical theories, immigration, gender and sexuality. As part of his cumulative dissertation, Tunay is working on the historical, socio-economic, and institutional factors that affect the lives of marginalized people and how they respond to discrimination, stigmatization in Germany. His previous work involved qualitative studies of the experiences of LGBTQ immigrant groups and Bulgarian sex workers in Berlin. His research has been supported by the DAAD, DeZIM, Heinrich Böll Sitftung, and Humboldt University's Institute for Social Sciences, among others. In addition, Tunay writes cultural commentaries about politics, popular culture, and activism in Germany and Turkey. He is a board member of the European Network for Queer Anthropology (ENQA).