Experts Database

Ovgu Ulgen is a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Montreal. In her dissertation, which has been funded by FRQSC (Québec research funding) and IRTG Diversity, she sought to understand immigrant belonging at the intersection of language and religion. She examined how societal particularities of Montréal and Toronto embedded in the processes of negotiating the difference and created a complex relation between language and religion. She explored how the lived experiences of immigrants differed from one another and what it said about interculturalism and multiculturalism in Canada. She further looked at how relations between immigrants and the majority groups and inter and intra-ethnic relations formed and transformed in these processes. Her analysis of the relation between language and religion made it possible to make sense of the continuing salience of religion in the “post-secular” age in Canada, specifically, how cultural religion emerged as an important determinant of immigrant boundary making in the communities she interviewed, especially in Québec. She holds an MA degree in Sociology from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. In her M.A. research, which was awarded a scholarship, she focused on forced migration, collective memory, and urban politics in a neighborhood of Istanbul, Turkey.

Postdoctoral Fellow at Tallinn University (Estonia) and the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain). Visiting Scholar at the Universidad Casa Grande (Ecuador). Dual Ph.D. in Humanities (Leiden University, the Netherlands) and in Political Science (Universidad Diego Portales, Chile). Chair of the IMISCOE's Election Committee. Co-Convenor of the Standing Committee of Migration, Citizenship, and Political Participation.

I am a population geographer and a migration expert with a keen interest on movements across international borders. My area of coverage is the ECOWAS Region, Africa, Europe and the world.

Sanam Vaghefi is a sociologist and qualitative researcher with a doctoral degree from the University of Victoria. Her research on the Iranian refugees in Canada was awarded the Best Student Paper Award by IRCC in 2021.
Her research interests include refugee migration, mental health, health inequities, migrant agency, digital ethnography and autoethnography. Her Ph.D. Project is entitled 'Exploring the Health and Migration Trajectories of Iranian Refugees in Canada'. Sanam is currently employed as a full-time faculty member at Capilano University, North Vancouver.

I graduated from the Immigration and Settlement Studies Master Program at Ryerson University. I hold a PhD in Social and Political Sciences by Iberoamericana University, Mexico. I am currently a full-time professor at the International Studies Department at Iberoamericana and teach in the Master in Migration Studies. I am also member of the Mexican National Research System and a founding partner of Laboratorio de Inivestigación Social Justicia en Movimiento, a Mexican NGO. My research interests focus on protection of nationals abroad, Diaspora-State relations, borders and migrant integration.

Graduate Student at the KTH - Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Department of Philosophy and History, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment (2015). I am part of the Marie Sklodowska Curie ITN program in Environmental Humanities ENHANCE. I am interested in working at the intersection between Environmental History, Environmental Humanities and Migration Studies, touching also upon Cultural Heritage, Memory Studies, Oral History, Psychogeography, and Political Ecology.

Currently, I am working on my doctoral thesis, which is provisionally entitled: "Coal Lives. Italians and the Metabolism of Coal in Wallonia, Belgium".

To scrutinize the socio-political implications of international migration, my work develops a transdisciplinary and transnational approach to human mobility.

To maximise the impact of research findings, I collaborate with professional videographers - see: https://oxco.world/ for more information.

Dr Zana Vathi has been conducting research in the field of migration since 2005. She is Reader/Associate Professor in Social Sciences at Edge Hill University in the UK. She was trained at the University of Sussex where she completed her PhD in Migration Studies in 2011. Dr Vathi is an expert in qualitative migration studies with fieldwork experience in in over 6 countries and with various migrant groups.