Experts Database

Valentina Mazzucato is Professor of Globalisation and Development at Maastricht University. She has been awarded 5 large-scale, international and interdisciplinary research grants to conduct multi-sited research in migrants’ African countries of origin and in communities where they live in European cities. She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) one of the highest honours conferred to scientists in The Netherlands. She heads interdisciplinary and multicultural teams that conduct multi-sited research.She has published widely on transnational migrant networks, transnational family life and the effects of mobility on the life worlds of youth with a migration background. She was recently awarded an ERC Consolidator grant.

Dr. Susanne Melde is a Senior Analyst at the Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC) at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Berlin, Germany. Her main areas of work are migration governance and knowledge management of understanding migration data.

Ms. Melde has 12 years of experience in working on migration research and policy at IOM. From 2014 to 2017 she has managed a major EU-funded research project on migration as an adaptation strategy to environmental and climate change in 6 pilot countries. Currently she coordinates the Global Migration Data Portal and analysis on migration governance in a number of countries.

She has a BA in International Relations from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany; an MA in Human Rights and a PhD in Migration Studies from Sussex University in the UK.

Dr Gabriela Mezzanotti is Associate Professor in Social Sciences at the University of South-Eastern Norway and a Lawyer. She is the co-leader of USN’s research group “Human Rights and Diversities”. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences and a MA degree in International Law. She chaired the UNHCR Sergio Vieira de Mello Chair at Unisinos University (Brazil) for 8 years. Her research addresses critical discourse studies, critical decolonial and intersectional approaches to rights and policies related to power, human rights and migration. She is a human rights activist and has a wide range of policy and practice-based experiences within migration and minorities contexts with intergovernmental bodies and NGOs in Latin America. She is also the former coordinator of the International Relations BA Program and the Executive Graduate Program in International Relations and Diplomacy at Unisinos University in Brazil. She is a former representative member of COMIRAT (Rio Grande do Sul State Committee for Migrants, Refugees, Stateless Persons, and Human Trafficking Survivors) and COMIRAT/POA (The city of Porto Alegre Committee for Migrants, Refugees, Stateless Persons, and Human Trafficking Survivors). She is a former member of NEABI (Afro descendants and Indigenous studies centre at Unisinos University) and a former member of its United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent Internal Commission. Mezzanotti is a former Associate Editor for the Human Rights Education Review (HRER/USN). She was a visiting faculty at the Federal Judges Superior School, Brazil, and, more recently, at the Institute of Regional Studies, Visiting Professors Programme at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, and at the Visiting Professors Program at the PhD Program in Society, Culture, and Borders, State University of West Parana, Brazil. Her most recent publications address critical and decolonial views on the racialization of Human Rights, Indigenous Peoples on the move, the criminalization of humanitarian aid, migrant detention, refugee protection in Latin America and urban violence in Brazil.

Domna Michail is a Professor of Anthropology of Education, Migration and Minorities, at the Department of Communication and Digital Media of the University of Western Macedonia-Greece (UOWM). She has completed her Bachelor Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Diploma of Advanced Studies and Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and PhD in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) in Great Britain. Currently she is the Director of the Center of Migration and Social Studies of the School of Social and Humanities Studies of the UOWM.

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.

Patricia Mindus is a legal and political philosopher at Uppsala University, Sweden. She has an interest in legal realism, democratic theory and migration. Signature contributions include the functionalist theory of citizenship and the theory of migration as institutional fact. Previously Wallenberg Academy Fellow, she is now the Director of Uppsala Forum for Democracy, Peace and Justice and the President of the Swedish IVR. She directs research on citizenship and migration policy in the EU, with a political and legal theory perspective and has authored several monographs on citizenship , European citizenship and rights.

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).