Experts Database

I am an Assistant Professor of Development and Education in Inclusive Societies at Utrecht University. I am studying interventions countering polarization in education, and educational cooperation initiatives between mosques, schools and youth care institutions sharing a student population in multiethnic neighbourhoods. In my work, I use qualitative methodology and adopt a multidisciplinary approach to studying issues of cultural diversity and learning. My research interests include integration and empowerment of migrant youth, ethnic and religious identity formation, multilingualism in children and sociology of education. I appreciate being approached for collaboration on these topics.

Previously for my Ph.D. research at the University of Amsterdam, I investigated the portrayal and practice (i.e. organization, learning goals, content, curriculum, and pedagogies) of mosque education in the Turkish Islamic communities in the Netherlands, with a special attention to the role played by this non-formal religious education in the integration of the Turkish-Dutch children.

I am a member of the American Educational Research Association, the Comparative and International Education Society, and the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies.

Helga Špadina is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law Osijek, Croatia. She specialized in international law, human rights law, migration law, labor and social law and anti-discrimination law. She has working experience with the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations and UN refugee agencies in South-East Europe and Middle East. Her international assignments focused on international refugee law, human rights protection, anti-human trafficking, migration management and protection capacity building. She regularly provides expert reports and conducts analysis of legislation to UN agencies, international organizations and EU Expert Committees.

Mr Theo Sparreboom took up the position of Labour Migration Specialist in the ILO’s Decent Work Team for Eastern and Southern Africa based in Pretoria in March 2019. Prior to joining the team in Pretoria, Mr Sparreboom worked for the Labour Migration Branch, the Statistics Department and the Economic and Labour Market Analysis Department at ILO headquarters in Geneva since 2007; he also held various technical and leading positions in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia for both the ILO and private international agencies from 1995 to 2007.

Mr Sparreboom is the ILO lead author of a 10-country study on the economic impact of immigration in developing and emerging economies (including Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Rwanda and South Africa), which was published by the ILO and OECD in 2018. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, and has published widely in official reports and peer reviewed journals on labour markets, migration, statistics, education and (youth) employment.

Sarah Spencer is Director of Strategy and a Senior Fellow at COMPAS and was Director of the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity from its inception in 2014 until March 2019. She is Chair of the Board of Directors of IMISCOE, the European network of migration research institutes and scholars, and a member of Kellogg College, Oxford’s largest and most international graduate college.

Sarah’s research interests focus on irregular migrants, on which she has been PI in projects on national and city responses to irregular migrants in Europe, initiated under an Open Society Fellowship, and on families with No Recourse to Public Funds in the UK; on integration (on which she is collaborating with Katharine Charsley, University of Bristol), human rights and equality issues, and on the policy making process. Sarah was awarded her doctorate at Erasmus University Rotterdam, has an MPhil from University College London and took her first degree at the University of Nottingham.

At the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, Sarah is responsible for the City Initiative on Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe (C-MISE); and for Oxford’s contribution to the Urban Innovative Action project in Utrecht, the Refugee Launchpad. She was Director of its Autumn Academy symposium from 2016-2018 and responsible for its award-winning online tool to assess the eligibility of migrant families for local authority support.

Sarah was a co-founder of the network of equality and human rights organisations in Britain, the Equality and Diversity Forum (now ‘Equally Ours’) and its Chair for ten years (2002-2012); a Commissioner and Deputy Chair (2003-2005) of a statutory body, the Commission for Racial Equality; Programme Director at the Institute for Public Policy Research (1990-2003); and Director of the human rights NGO, Liberty (1984-1989). She has twice been seconded into the Cabinet Office strategy unit to contribute to studies on migration policy and has been a member of government Taskforces and advisory bodies. In 2007 she received a CBE for services to equality and human rights.

Anna Spiegel is a research associate at the Research and Teaching Unit on Economics and Work at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University. She has carried out research on transnational mobility of people and knowledge in different world regions. In her research on translocal life worlds of female Bolivian migrants in the Global City Buenos Aires she concentrated on dance as a translocal practice. As a researcher in the VW funded Project “Negotiating Development: Translocal Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies” and in her doctoral thesis she focused on the transnational negotiations of Women’s and Human Rights in Malaysia in the context of Islamisation. In her current research she works on the ambivalences and paradoxes of practiced elite cosmopolitanisms of executive expatriates employed in transnational corporations and their new forms of working, belonging and dwelling.

Her main research interests are: transnationalization and mobility, skilled and non-skilled migration, global negotiations of knowledge, global ethnography, belonging, transience

Niels Spierings studies questions of inclusion, the degree to which people want, can and are 'allowed to' participate in social, economic and political spheres. His most recent projects focus on gender/sexual equality among and political inclusion of Muslim citizens in Western Europe. In addition, he keeps working on the questions of women's labour market participation (inequalities) among migrant women, quantitative intersectionality research, and anti-migrant and anti-gender politics (in particular the populist radical right)

Dr Joy Spiliopoulos joined the SAPPHIRE research group, Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Leicester, UK, in June 2023. She is part of the NIHR funded Greater Manchester Patient Safety Research Collaboration as a Research Associate for the theme: 'Enhancing cultures of safety'. She is a Visiting Fellow for the Centre of Health Innovation, Leadership and Learning (CHILL) at the Nottingham University Business School, UK.
Her background is in Applied Social Science/Social Work and she holds a PhD from the Department of Applied Social Science (now Department of Sociology), Lancaster University.
She has worked for academic institutions in the UK (Lancaster University, University of Leicester and Sheffield College) and China (University of Nottingham Ningbo China, and Zhejiang University) and taught in the subject areas of sociology, international relations, criminology, gender studies.
She has worked on a number of collaborative projects funded by NGOs and government bodies (NIHR, ESRC, DFID, Oxfam, UK Home Office, local authority funded projects). She recently completed two funded projects on the effects of 'Brexit' on the retention and recruitment of migrant NHS nurses; and on returnee Filipino nurses. The collaborative project she led, 'Retention and recruitment of migrant nurses post-Brexit', has received international media attention, including BBC Radio Nottingham interview and features in television, newspaper, think tanks and internet blogs in the USA, China, Singapore, the UK and other European countries, also from bodies such as the Royal College of Nursing (Nursing Standard journal), and others. Joy's research focuses on issues of migration, gender, racism, exploitation and discrimination, UK race relations, social and health inequalities, adult social care, and others, using primarily feminist theory (intersectionality, critical feminist theory). Much of her work has focused on the positioning of nurses, care workers and domestic workers, in the NHS and the social care sector, in the UK and elsewhere (the Philippines), and more recently on the retention and recruitment of migrant nurses post-Brexit. She has a particular interest in social impact, public engagement and co-creation with stakeholders.