Experts Database

Dr. Inta Mierina is the Director of The Center for Migration and Diaspora Research and tenured professor at the University of Latvia Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences. She has directed several research grants on migration, including the ESF research grant “The Emigrant Communities of Latvia,” in which 14,068 Latvian emigrants were surveyed in 118 countries. She has been involved in a number of international comparative studies concerning migrants, mostly their civic and political participation, working careers, inequality, and well-being. She is the country coordinator of the European Values Study (EVS) in Latvia. Mieriņa has been a visiting researcher at academic institutions in Germany, Denmark, Poland, and the U.S. – at the University of Washington as a Fulbright research fellow (2015), as well as at the University of Yale as Juris Padegs Post-doctoral fellow (2016). Her publications have appeared in Social Science Research, The Sociological Review, European Societies, Europe-Asia Studies, and other journals.

Is a DAAD professor at the Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. She is also professor of sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv). In the spring semesters of 2020 and 2022 she was visiting lecturer at the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland). She has participated in more than 20 sociological research projects, in 10 of which she was a principal investigator. She researches a wide range of areas, including the historical aspects of deviant and delinquent behavior, urban studies, paramilitary motivations, forced displacement, migration and has over twenty years of research and teaching experience. In 2016 she was a visiting professor in Ukraine European Dialogue at the Institute for Human Science (Vienna), and in 2015 she was Eugene and Daymel Shklar Research Fellow Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute.

Stefan Millar is a doctoral candidate in the Law and Anthropology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. He earned a BSc in Anthropology at the University of Kent (United Kingdom), and then conducted his Master’s studies in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research (with a specialization in Social Anthropology) at Tampere University (Finland). Currently, his research examines the role of states within Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement in Turkana county, Kenya. The researcher is a part of a cohort “the technicization of exclusionary practices in the context of migration” at the Law and Anthropology Department, which critically examines the expansion and impact of the EU’s legal and technological strategies to control migration.

Amal Miri holds a PhD in Gender & Diversity from Ghent University. In this ethnographic research at the intersection of marriage migration, motherhood and integration among Moroccan women in Flanders, she conducted feminist and participatory action research with expertise in affective citizenship. As part of this research, she has published in several international peer-reviewed journals such as JEMS. In the past she worked as a project researcher at ella, a non-profit organization promoting the empowerment and participation process of women from ethnic minority (ECM) groups in Brussels and Flanders. During this period Miri worked on a government funded project called NASIB, dedicated to empower and inform actual (Flanders) and future marriage migrants (in Morocco). Today she works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies (CeMIS - department of Sociology).

Mohamed Munas is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Management Research of the Nijmegen School of Management, Department of Geography and Planning, Radboud University, the Netherlands. His PhD dissertation titled “Reconnections”: Complexities of diaspora engagement in Sri Lanka focuses on understanding the collective engagement of diaspora in post-war recovery. This multisited research brings the experiences and perspectives of the individuals and organisational representatives together from Sri Lanka, United Kingdom and Australia. Munas's research critically looks at diaspora-led development interactions and their outcomes on post-war societies using postdevelopment lens. Further, this research looks at how diasporic identities are mobilised to form collectives and organisations that are used as vehicles to channel developmental assistance.

Lea Molina Caminero is a social geographer (M.A. University of Osnabrück) and completed her thesis on lifestyle-oriented youth mobilities to Lisbon in 2020 at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning (IGOT), University of Lisbon. Her research interests cover privileged mobility and its impact on urban and rural areas. Here she is particularly interested in inequalities in labour and mobility regimes and how these are reflected socio-spatially.

Laura Morales is Professor in Political Science/Comparative Politics at Sciences Po, affiliated with CEE. She previously worked at the University of Leicester, the University of Manchester, the University of Murcia, the Complutense University of Madrid and the Autonomous University of Madrid. She has held visiting scholar positions at the Amsterdam School for Social Research, Columbia University, Harvard University and Sciences Po Grenoble. Her research interests lie, especially, in the areas of comparative political behavior, public opinion, political parties, the politics of immigration, and comparative politics. She has published Joining Political Organisations. Institutions, Mobilisation and Participation in Western Democracies, Colchester: ECPR Press, 2009; Political Discussion in Modern Democracies in a Comparative Perspective (edited with Michael Wolf and Ken’ichi Ikeda), London: Routledge, 2010; and Social Capital, Political Participation and Migration in Europe. Making Multicultural Democracy Work? (edited with Marco Giugni), Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011; as well as a number of articles in academic international journals. She is also the Chair of the COST Action "International Ethnic and Immigrant Minorities' Survey Data Network", which gathers a network of researchers from 33 countries working on improving the access, usability, dissemination and standards of the multiple and scattered survey data that exist on the economic, social and political integration of ethnic and migrant minorities. Other recent projects she has worked on include: the project LOCALMULTIDEM (funded by the 6th Framework Programme, on migrants' social capital and participation in Europe; the project Support and Opposition to Migration (funded by the 7th Framework Programme) on the politicization of migration across Europe; the Immigrant Citizens Survey (funded by the European Fund for the Integration of Third Country Nationals and the King Baudouin Foundtion); and the project Pathways (funded by Open Research Area grant of the British ESRC, the Dutch NWO, the French ANR and the German DFG).

Daniel Morales holds a PhD (sociolinguistics and migration studies) and an MA in Transnational Studies by the University of Southampton, UK. He also holds a BA in English Linguistics, Translation and Literary studies by Universidad Autónoma de Queretaro, Mexico. He has been a Fulbright scholar in the United States and is a co-opted member of the International Association of Spanish in Society, an academic network that explores issues around language, globalization and migration, language policy, minority language rights, etc.
He has done research on Latin American migration to the UK where he has explored issues of language and identity and intra-group relations in the Latin American community in London. His research interests include language in society, language ideologies, language, globalization and migration. His work also incorporates different approaches of discourse studies, narrative studies as well as ethnographic methods to shed light on social inequality and exclusion from a sociolinguistic perspective.
He is also a member of Mexico's National System of Researchers by the National Council of Science and Technology.

Dr. Madalina Moraru is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Law Faculty of the Masaryk University, Brno where she has obtained a research grant for the project on Reforming European Administrative Governance in times of crisis: Common or disjunctive sector regulatory models (EUADMIN-GOV). She is also a Research Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI), Centre for Judicial Cooperation (CJC), in Florence, Italy, where she is coordinating the legal training on asylum and migration, and on the interpretation and application of the EU Charter in various EU law fields. She is the editor of Distinguished Lecture Series Papers, of the European University Institute, Centre for Judicial Cooperation.
She obtained her Doctoral Degree in Law from the European University Institute with a thesis entitled Protecting (unrepresented) EU citizens in third countries: the intertwining roles of the EU and its Member States). She has a magna cum laude LL.M. in European Law from Durham University (2008), as well as from the EUI (2010), and a LL.B. from the Faculty of Law, Bucharest (2007). Her research interests include the law and policies of EU external relations, consular and diplomatic law, fundamental rights, judicial dialogue, asylum and migration, and EU citizenship law.
She has been regularly invited to speak as expert on EU law issues by EU Institutions and international and non-governmental organisations. She has been the advisor for a Member of the European Parliament. She is also the founder of the non-governmental organisation, European Centre for Legal Expertise, which is actively participating in policy analysis and drafting in the field of human rights. She has won several EU-funded grants on fundamental rights, EU policy implementation and legal training (ACTIONES, e-Nact) She has extensive expertise in coordinating European wide projects involving research and consultancy in the field of asylum and migration and fundamental rights.
She has published extensively on the topic of the EU citizenship rights, fundament