Experts Database

I am a researcher with extensive experience in the field of Political Science and MENA region at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR). I hold a BA in Political Science and International Relations (University of Pavia), and a MA in Modern Middle East Studies (Leiden University). My research investigates the coexistence of migration and protest within the same space and time, with particular attention to the individual-level choice between these two types of behavior. I examine reasons, opportunities for mobilization of young Moroccans living in Rabat, Tangier and Nador. I am interested in the impact that local-context factors, can have on the decision to mobilize towards protest and/or migration, or none of them.

Sanja Bökle is a Doctoral Research Fellow in the research project “Civil Society Organizations and the Challenges of Migration: Agents of Change (ZOMiDi)”. Sanja studied international development studies at the University of Vienna and the Universidad de la República Uruguay, and worked as a Student Assistant at the Department for Development Cooperation and Development Politics at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Vienna. Drawing from post-colonial, queer and feminist theories, Sanja’s master thesis asked how gender, sexuality, desire, and race are normed, negotiated, limited, and included in international voluntary work, and was published in the Kölner Wissenschaftsverlag and Nomos-Verlag. Sanja worked for many years as a social justice and diversity trainer, and founded an NGO for political education.

Susanne Boersma is a PhD fellow in the POEM EU H2020 research project, for which she is based at Museum Europäischer Kulturen – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (SPK) and the University of Hamburg. She looks at the role of museums in the conversation about migration and their efforts to let ‘refugees speak from themselves’. Building on her background in cultural studies, languages and arts, she has taken an interest in the potential role of cultural institutions in narrative and integration processes in Europe.

Colleen Boland is postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where she works on the EU Horizon2020 funded ITFLOWS project investigating management of migration flows to the EU and co-coordinates the project’s Gender Committee. She holds a PhD in Sociology and Anthropology from the Complutense University of Madrid. Her research interests relate to the intersection of gender and diversity, asylum rights and management, and the construction of citizenship and belonging with reference to minority populations in European societies. She is currently a 2021-2022 re:constitution Fellow, a Stiftung Mercator funded Forum Transregionale Studien and Democracy Reporting International program.

Dr. Bonfanti is a social anthropologist, specialized in gender studies, with expertise on South Asian diasporas. From a background in cultural studies, she gained a PhD in Anthropology of Migrations for her multi-sited ethnography conducted between Italy and India in 2012-15, where she analyzed generational change among Punjabi transnational families. Keen on participatory methods, her research interests include kinship, religious pluralism and media cultures, approached through intersectionality and life stories. Former visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen (DE), since 2017 she has collaborated within the comparative ERC HOMInG Project based at University of Trento (IT), exploring the home-migration nexus across European cities with a multiscale lens and mixed qualitative methods. Dr. Bonfanti has published widely in Italian and English, and recently co-authored “Shifting Roofs: Ethnographies of Home and Mobility”, Routledge 2020. Currently, while co-editing a collection of migrants’ life stories for Berghahn Books, she is also engaged in filmmaking, co-directing an ethnographic movie on minority houses of worship in times of pandemic.

Gladys F. Bongapat is a recipient of the MEXT Scholarship for a Ph.D. program at the Graduate School of International Development at Nagoya University. Her research focuses on irregular Filipino migrants in Japan. She also took her master’s degree at the same department with a major in Inclusive Society and State, and with minors in Poverty and Social Policy and Peace and Governance. For her master’s degree, she was a recipient of the Mitsubishi UFJ Trust Scholarship Foundation and a beneficiary of the Kamenori Foundation.