Experts Database

Philippa Brunner-Heywood is a PhD student in Sociology of Education and Culture at Uppsala University within the graduate school 'Education, Learning and Globalization' , a collaboration between Uppsala, Malmö and Södertörn universities. Her thesis works to uncover the structure of the education labour market for secondary school teachers in Sweden, while exploring the experiences of migrant teachers navigating within it and the effect they have on the national landscape of the teaching profession.
She is a member of the research group Sociology of Education and Culture (SEC) , as well as the research group for Studies on Education, Migration and Segregation (EMS). She currently currently acts as a country expert for the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project.

Marco BRUNO (PhD) is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at Sapienza University of Rome, Department of Communication and Social Research. His research focuses on media and cultural diversity (with particular reference to Islam and migratory processes), journalism, communication and political phenomena.

Dr. Irma Budginaite-Mackine is an assistant professor at Vilnius University. She is experienced in carrying out qualitative and quantitative social research studies, as well as managing national and international research projects. Her main research interests include sociology of migration, intergenerational relations, gender, racialisation and othering.

Before completing my PhD in Politics on the topic statelessness at the University of Edinburgh, I took an MA in International Studies at Seoul National University, and a BA in Philosophy and Business Studies at the University of Mannheim. Since 2019, I've been an associate member of the “European Network on Statelessness” and a co-chair of the “Normative Theory of Immigration Working Group” which is an international collective of scholars working at the intersections of migration studies, policy studies, and political theory.

Researcher, University of Lisbon, IGOT-CEG
PhD in migration studies, human geography, Marie Curie fellow, University of Lisbon
MSc in sociology of migration, Erasmus Mundus, University College Dublin
BA in international relations, University of São Paulo

Elena Bulakh is currently a Russian language lecturer at SOCIUS-ISEG (Lisbon University). She is also a PhD student at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS-UL) of University of Lisbon. Her current research project is devoted to a new wave of the Russian migration to Portugal (1991-2017) with a special focus on networks, transnationalism, and migrants' identity.

I am a human geographer focusing on social and development geography in the global south. In my work I focus on issues related to social inequalities, human-technology-relations, human-environment-relations, and social resilience in the context of globalisation. I am particularly interested in the diversifying patterns of mobilities and migration as well as digital transformations in the global south. My theoretical approach is, among others, inspired by Bourdieu's theory of practice, the new mobilities paradigm, as well as debates on translocality, transnationalism, and social resilience. In my point of view good geographical research should not only be theoretically profound but also empirically grounded. There is no good theory without proper and profound empirical research and vice versa.
I studied geography, development economics, and anthropology at the University of Bonn and focused in my PhD research on migration and translocal dimensions of social resilience in gendered migration systems. I very much appreciate working with Mixed-Methods and Multi-sited Ethnography and have worked for many years in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Thailand, Singapore, and Germany.

Giacomo Buoncompagni, Ph.D., is a research fellow in cultural sociology and media studies at the University of Florence in Italy. He teaches Sociology of Journalism at the University of Verona, and Power, Information, and Intelligence at the University of Bologna Bologna. In 2019 he won the Pareto Prize for Sociology; he has published several books and papers on immigration, security, and digital media.