Experts Database

Postdoctoral Research Fellow with demonstrated record of research success in Balkan Studies, South-East European Studies, Border Studies and Migration Studies. Currently postdoctoral fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin. PhD thesis on Slavic and Albanian collective memory and contemporary identity discourses in Macedonia defended at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland). Research conducted addresses the interface of visual culture, anthropology and memory studies, and focuses on South Slavic-Albanian borderlands.

Taras Romashchenko is a Ukrainian scholar with research interests in international economics, international labour migration and diaspora, FDI and remittances. PhD in Economics and Associate Professor at Bohdan Khmelnytsky National University of Cherkasy. He is also a senior lecturer in international economic relations and migration, as well as a visiting professor at Bielefeld University (Germany) and has been a visiting research fellow at Danube University Krems (Austria).

Sanam Roohi is a Marie Curie COFUND fellow at Max Weber Kolleg, Erfurt, currently researching the transnationalisation of the Telangana movement. She defended her thesis ‘Giving Back: Diaspora Philanthropy and the Transnationalisation of Caste in Guntur (India)’ from the University of Amsterdam in December 2016. Her research outputs include publication of a few book chapters and articles in journals including Modern Asian Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, International Political Sociology and Ethnic and Migration Studies, apart from a co-produced film on diaspora philanthropy. She worked as an assistant professor at St. Joseph’s (Autonomous), Bangalore, between September 2016 and April 2018. Roohi was a 2018 SSRC InterAsia Fellow at the Global and Transregional Studies Platform, Georg-August University, Göttingen. She has also been awarded a Humboldt fellowship which starts in September 2020 at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen.

Dr Lena Rose is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Law Faculty at the University of Oxford. Her research areas are migration and refugee studies, legal anthropology, religion, and globalisation.

Her current three-year interdisciplinary research project entitled 'Christianity on Trial: Asylum, Conversion, and the Modern Nation-State' (2019-2022) examines the negotiation of ‘Christianity’ through the lens of asylum adjudications of claimants based on the fear of religious persecution following a conversion to Christianity. In these cases, secular judges have to assess the genuineness of the conversion, and risks of practising Christianity in the country of origin of the applicants. This study of case law and ethnographic fieldwork at courts in Germany, France, and the UK explores the tensions between culture, religion, and power in the negotiation of what 'Christianity' is.

Lena completed her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology in May 2019, based at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford. Her doctoral work was concerned with the role of power in the circulation of ideas, resources, people, and theology within global evangelicalism. She conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Palestinian and 'Western' evangelical Christians in Israel-Palestine, Europe and North America, while paying attention to the theologies that shape evangelicals' approaches to Israel. Her doctoral work has already resulted in a number of publications in journals such as Current Anthropology, Global Networks, and Ethnos.

Lena holds an MSc Migration Studies (University of Oxford, 2013) and has worked as research assistant on various projects at the International Migration Institute, the Refugee Studies Centre, and the Socio-Legal Studies Centre (in particular Prof Livia Holden's EURO-EXPERT project).

Since 2017, Lena is the co-founder and convener of the interdisciplinary Oxford Migration and Mobility Network (@MigMobNetwork), which draws together researchers of migration and mobility from across the University. It is hosted by the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity at COMPAS and combines the expertise of more than a hundred researchers from more than twenty different departments from across the University of Oxford.

Paolo Ruspini (MA Pol. Sci., PhD, Milan) has been researching international and European migration and integration since 1997 with a comparative approach and by drawing on mixed methods. He is currently Associate Researcher at the Institute of Sociological Research (IRS), Geneva School of Social Science, University of Geneva, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Roehampton. Recent publications include Migrants Unbound (2019, Transnational Press London, author) Migration and Transnationalism Between Switzerland and Bulgaria (2017, Springer, co-editor) and A Decade of EU Enlargement: A Changing Framework and Patterns of Migration, (2014, Central and Eastern European Migration Review, Vol. 3, No. 2, co-editor).

Negin is a Sociology instructor at the department of Sociology and Anthropology of Langara College in Vancouver, BC. She has a MA in Sociology from the University of Calgary where she worked on a qualitative research project on the resettlement of Yazidi refugees in Calgary, AB. Her MA thesis explored the agency and resilience of Yazidi women as well as the role of women as service provider staff in the resettlement of the Yazidi community. She is passionate about gender equality and is interested in the experiences of displacement, family conflict, and domestic violence in refugee and immigrant families. As an immigrant herself, Negin is invested in exploring identity crises and the meaning of “home” through the immigration/settlement journey. Negin also works as the Donations Coordinator at AMSSA, Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of BC.

Zeynep Sahin Mencutek’s research examines the governance of migration, migration narratives, foreign policy-migration nexus, comparative policies and politics in the Global South, and diaspora politics. Her work is mainly based on long-term, qualitative and comparative analysis. Her book, Refugee Governance, State and Politics in the Middle East (Routledge, 2018) explores how refugee governance differs across countries and why they diverge, looking in particular at Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, three of the world's top refugee hosting countries. She published several articles in internationally refereed journals, chapters in international collected volumes, encyclopaedia entries, book reviews and policy reports.

Zeynep received her PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Southern California in 2011. Previously, she served as an assistant professor at the Department of International Relations at Gediz University in Turkey and achieved the rank of Docent in 2018. She held an international fellowship at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg from March 2019 to February 2020 to conduct research on polycentric governance, emerging transnationalism and grassroots community organizations of Syrian refugees.

Since November 2017, she serves as the Senior Research Fellow for the Horizon2020 project titled RESPOND: Multilevel Governance of Mass Migration in Europe and Beyond. She prepares co-authored research reports on the legal and institutional framework of refugee governance, border controls, and international protection in Turkey as well as comparative reports of asylum regimes and integration. She is a visiting fellow at the Institute for Peace and Development, University of Duisburg-Essen and is gained Humboldt Research Fellowship Programme for Experienced Researchers to conduct a comparative research on the governance of refugee returns.