Experts Database

PdD Student Department of Political Science, University of Lucerne;
Research Fellow, National Center of Competence for Migration and Mobility Studies, nccr - on the move

Belinda is a PhD researcher on the Vulnerable State project and a lawyer. Her PhD is a conceptual and empirical investigation of the punitive-humanitarian complex as it operates in asylum claims processes and judicial outcomes in the UK. She also explores colonial legacies and their contemporary manifestations in migration discourse.

Diana Rayes is a Nonresident Fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy focusing on regional public health trends and refugee issues. She is a PhD candidate in International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, specializing in the impact of conflict and displacement on refugee and migrant health. She has previously worked with the World Health Organization, the Syrian American Medical Society, the Migration Policy Institute, and consulted on projects for the Lancet Commission on Syria, E.U. Delegation to Syria, the World Refugee Council, and the Federation of American Scientists. Ms. Rayes has published widely on humanitarian health trends in Syria in peer-reviewed journals including the British Medical Journal, PLOS Medicine, and the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, and is a steering committee member of the Syria Public Health Network. A recipient of the Fulbright Research Fellowship, Ms. Rayes holds a master’s in public mental health and a certificate in humanitarian assistance from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a BS in psychology from Arizona State University.

Psychologist and MHPSS consultant
PhD in Anthropology at ISCTE-IUL (Lisbon)
Postdoc Fellow at CIS (Center for Social research and Intervention), ISCTE-IUL
Activist for migrant justice
Interest in informal solidarity, mobilities, migration, activism and climate justice

I am Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo. My most recent books are the edited collection Anthropological Approaches to Reading Migrant Writing: Reimagining Ethnographic Methods, Knowledge, and Power (w/Helena Wulff; Routledge 2024) and Bourdieu and Social Space: Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements (Berghahn, 2020). My previous 5 books include Locating Bourdieu (Indiana 2005); and Civic Engagements: The Citizenship Practices of Asian Indian and Vietnamese Immigrants (w/Caroline Brettell; Stanford 2012). I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in France, the United States, and England. My most recent ethnographic project, the subject of a forthcoming monograph (Routledge), is on French migration to London in the 21st century. I am a past-President of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe and I have served on the Executive Committee of the Council for European Studies. I was awarded a Jean Monnet Chair from the European Commission, and I hold the title of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques conferred by the French government.

I am a qualified European lawyer, specialized in International law at the University of Milan, at the University of Strasbourg and at Sorbonne University in Paris.
Human rights defender, graduated at the International Institute of human rights, at the Global Campus for human rights, at the Union of lawyers for human rights and at the Schuman Center.
International Mediator since 2005, recognized by the American Bar Association.
Researcher at the Polytechnic University of Milan
Member of the Union of Italian lawyers for Human Rights since 2016.
Member of the International Commission for human rights at the Bar of Milan since 2017.
Member of the European Court of Arbitration – Center of mediation and arbitration for Europe and Middle East since 2011.
Member of the Observatory on solidarity of Milan
Member of the association in defense of environment Laudato sì
Member of the International network Indifesa di
Lawyer since 2007, I’ve practiced different fields of international law:
International public and private law
International protection of human rights
International environmental law
International law of the sea
International protection of asylum seekers
International proceedings against discriminations
International criminal law
International proceedings against torture
International commercial law
International alternative dispute resolution (ADR)

Dr. David Reichel is a researcher in the Research & Data Unit at the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). He is responsible for managing FRA's research on artificial intelligence and on online content moderation. He has extensive experience in working with data and statistics in an international context. Prior to joining FRA in 2014, he worked for the research department of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) and as a lecturer at the Institute for Sociology and the Institute for International Development at the University of Vienna. He is teaching at the Political Science Department at Vienna University and has published numerous articles, working papers and book chapters on issues related to migration and integration statistics, citizenship and human rights. Publications are prepared in his private capacity and views are his own.

Current Position: Head of the interdisciplinary Research Group "The Production of Knowledge on Migration" at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS), University of Osnabrueck, Germany, and Adjunct Lecturer of Modern European History at the University of Leipzig.

I am a historian of Modern Europe, specialising in migration history, urban history and the history of the social sciences. In my work, I mostly focus on 19th- and 20th-century British, French and German history, whereby I seek to investigate these Western European histories as part of broader transnational processes such as globalization and decolonization. In my first book, Grenzen der Freizügigkeit: Migrationskontrolle in Großbritannien und Deutschland, 1880-1930 (München: Oldenbourg, 2010), I have explored the tension between globalized movement and state control in the late 19th and early 20th century. Comparing practices of immigration control in the British and German migration regime, I seek to understand how they helped produce ‘illegal migration’ as a new administrative category.
In my current book “Urban Problem Zones in (Post)Colonial France and West Germany” I investigate a shift from “class” to “race” and “ethnicity” in the construction of social problems in late 20th century-Western Europe. Focussing on different forms of urban marginality in peripheral shanty-towns, high-rise housing estates and so-called “migrant quarters”, the book is based on my habilitation thesis that I recently finished.

Education
PhD Humboldt-University Berlin (2008)
M.A. Humboldt-University, Berlin (Modern History and Modern German Literature, 2003)
M.A. University College London (Modern History, 2001)