Experts Database

Dr Rachel Woodlock is an academic and writer who researches and teaches about Islam and Muslims. She co-edited Fear of Muslims? International Perspectives on Islamophobia with Professor Douglas Pratt (Springer, 2016), an evidenced-based examination of Islamophobia in both 'old-world' Europe and the 'new-world' of America and Australia, and also Southeast Asia. She also co-wrote For God's Sake: An Atheist, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim Debate Religion (Pan MacMillan, 2013), discussing some of life's biggest questions.

She completed a Bachelor of Arts (Arabic & Islamic Studies) and a Master of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, and her doctoral research undertaken at Monash University looked at the social integration of religious Muslims in Australia. Dr Woodlock has lectured widely and taught subjects on Islam and Muslims at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her interests include Islamic theology, philosophy, comparative fiqh, praxis in minority contexts, Muslim social inclusion, as well as sectarian and heterodox movements.

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Since January 2019, I am a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University’s Centre for the Study of Immigration and Politics (CSPI) and Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la diversité et la démocratie (cridaq). After obtaining my dual PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris and Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles, I moved to Canada (Montreal) to further study migration politics in federal states. As a political scientist, I pursue a comparative research agenda focused on the dynamics of immigration policymaking at the subnational level

More generally, I study immigration, public policy, comparative politics, and federalism. My PhD dissertation is entitled « Intégrer pour exister ? Nationalisme sous-étatique et intégration des immigrés en Flandre et au Québec » (“Why integrate? Sub-state nationalism and immigrant integration in Flanders and Quebec”). I graduated in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris (Political Theory) as well as in Law from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Master in de rechten – Master of Laws, LL.M publiek recht/public law). From December 2015 to May 2016, I was a Visiting Assistant in Research at Yale University (MacMillan Center). From May 2016 to October 2016, I was in Montreal for a research stay at McGill University. In 2018, I was a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University (OXPO Visiting Scheme). I am the co-coordinator of the Working Group Political Theory and FéDéRé within the Belgian Association of Political Science (ABSP) and I co-edit the association’s blog (BePolitix). I am also part of a research team studying Quebec’s migration politics/policies, in which I am in charge of knowledge transfer (ÉRIQA – Équipe de recherche sur l’immigration dans le Québec actuel).

Zetong Xiao is a Ph.D. Student in History of Latin America at Complutense University of Madrid. His research project focuses on Chinese immigration to Costa Rica between 1900-2010, with an emphasis on the transformation of transnational connections and the construction of migrant networks. He is also expanding his interest to food studies, particularly the cultural politics of food and foodscapes of Chinese Latin American cuisine.

Zhe Xu is a PhD candidate in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Cologne. His research focuses on humanitarian communication, digital journalism, and computational methodologies. His academic work explores how mediated and digitalized crises influence the humanitarian agenda and the decision-making process in the contemporary polymedia milieu.

Nikos Xypolytas is a sociologist focusing on migration and labour. His research interests highlight the importance of low-status work for migrant exclusion. The result of this research is the elaboration of a theoretical scheme that approaches migrant exclusion in a holistic manner by identifying different stages in the migration and integration processes. His latest research follows the same theoretical framework and focuses on the refugee crisis and its implications for the future integration of refugees in the host countries of Europe. He currently works at the Department of Sociology in University of the Aegean.

My interdisciplinary research connects the theoretical and conceptual borders of political science, sociology, and political psychology. Specifically, I work on migrant organisations in host countries (diaspora organizations) and recipient countries (civic networks and organizations that advocate refugee /migrant rights). In my current project, I investigate alternative communicative narratives that such organisations can adopt to reach out to the wider public. These communicative narratives reframe migrants and refugees as 'deserving' and 'rights-bearing agents' and seek to generate cross-partisan public deliberation and positive attitudes. In my current project, I combine fieldwork, network analysis, surveys and online randomized experiments to predict how social change for more inclusive societies can be initiated. This research aims to offer policy-relevant alternatives to change racialized attitudes of various ideological, socio-economic, and psychographic groups as well as non-citizens (migrants and refugees).