Experts Database

Dr. Irma Budginaite-Mackine is an assistant professor at Vilnius University. She is experienced in carrying out qualitative and quantitative social research studies, as well as managing national and international research projects. Her main research interests include sociology of migration, intergenerational relations, gender, racialisation and othering.

Before completing my PhD in Politics on the topic statelessness at the University of Edinburgh, I took an MA in International Studies at Seoul National University, and a BA in Philosophy and Business Studies at the University of Mannheim. Since 2019, I've been an associate member of the “European Network on Statelessness” and a co-chair of the “Normative Theory of Immigration Working Group” which is an international collective of scholars working at the intersections of migration studies, policy studies, and political theory.

Researcher, University of Lisbon, IGOT-CEG
PhD in migration studies, human geography, Marie Curie fellow, University of Lisbon
MSc in sociology of migration, Erasmus Mundus, University College Dublin
BA in international relations, University of São Paulo

Elena Bulakh is currently a Russian language lecturer at SOCIUS-ISEG (Lisbon University). She is also a PhD student at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS-UL) of University of Lisbon. Her current research project is devoted to a new wave of the Russian migration to Portugal (1991-2017) with a special focus on networks, transnationalism, and migrants' identity.

I am a human geographer focusing on social and development geography in the global south. In my work I focus on issues related to social inequalities, human-technology-relations, human-environment-relations, and social resilience in the context of globalisation. I am particularly interested in the diversifying patterns of mobilities and migration as well as digital transformations in the global south. My theoretical approach is, among others, inspired by Bourdieu's theory of practice, the new mobilities paradigm, as well as debates on translocality, transnationalism, and social resilience. In my point of view good geographical research should not only be theoretically profound but also empirically grounded. There is no good theory without proper and profound empirical research and vice versa.
I studied geography, development economics, and anthropology at the University of Bonn and focused in my PhD research on migration and translocal dimensions of social resilience in gendered migration systems. I very much appreciate working with Mixed-Methods and Multi-sited Ethnography and have worked for many years in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Thailand, Singapore, and Germany.

Giacomo Buoncompagni, Ph.D., is a research fellow in cultural sociology and media studies at the University of Florence in Italy. He teaches Sociology of Journalism at the University of Verona, and Power, Information, and Intelligence at the University of Bologna Bologna. In 2019 he won the Pareto Prize for Sociology; he has published several books and papers on immigration, security, and digital media.

Alessio Buonomo, is a temporary research fellow at the University of Naples Federico II. He is part of the editorial board of the Rivista Italiana di Economica, Demografia e Statistica (RIEDS). He obtained his PhD in School of Statistical Sciences (Demography) from the Department of Statistics at the University of Rome La Sapienza. He completed the program European Doctoral School in Demography (EDSD) at the University Warsaw School of Economics (ESG) in Poland, after successfully passing the preparatory courses at the Max Palnk Institute for demographic research in Rostock (Germany). He did also a transnational visiting grant at the Centre for Demographic Studies (CED) in Barcellona for the In-Grid2 project. Alessio's main research interests are migration, education, employment and political participation of natives and individuals with migratory background. Specifically he studied characteristics and determinants of migration (internal and international) of nationals and foreigners. He has also conducted research on school enrollment and early school leaving, in particular focusing on foreigners and second generation. Furthermore, he studied social and psychological aspects of the labor integration of the population with migratory background.

Merve Burnazoglu is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Economics as part of the Applied Economics Section at the Utrecht University School of Economics. She works mainly on political economy, and philosophy and methodology of economics and applies it to migration and integration. She is also a Mercatus Center Adam Smith Fellow at George Mason University; coordinates research on Social Economics at the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE).