Experts Database

ALICE MPOFU-COLES
Alice is currently writing her thesis as PhD candidate and Research Assistant Human Geography at the University of Reading in the School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science. Alice is also working on a Professional Specialist Role on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at the university to address race equality. Her research is on Identity and Transnational activities Among Young Zimbabwean Diaspora in the UK.
For over 15 years she volunteered at the Reading Refugee Support Group (RRSG) both as vice-chair and chair including being involved in the Gruntivig Women’s Project – Women Refugees Learning together in Europe. She is currently a trustee of the Reading City of Sanctuary and Alliance for Cohesion and Racial Equality (ACRE) and a specialist Ambassador for Global Female Wave of Change. She is also involved in Universities of Sanctuaries in the UK – leading Universities to give scholarships to refugees and be a safe space for sanctuary seekers. She also advocates and portrays a more positive image of refugees, black people, women, young people by participating in numerous projects. She has done BBC television documentary and interviews on refugees' plight, poverty, women and speaks at events and conferences. She furthers her activism by writing, actively involved with different human rights organisations, democracy, education and poverty.
Alice was given the most inspirational refugee women Driver award in 2020. She nominated the Reading Refugee Support Group for the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service, and this was awarded in 2019 receiving it from the Queen’s representative, Sheriff of Berkshire. She was given an Honorary Masters of Universities by the Open University in 2013 at Poole's ceremony for her services to refugees, communities, education, and civil services. She was presented with an award by the then President Chissano of Mozambique in 1996 for her writing on working with culturally diverse communities. This was achieved while working as a diplomat in Mozambique and preceded a posting to the former Yugoslavia, Belgrade. She worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Zimbabwe, was posted to Belgrade and then Maputo. She also worked in the office of the Vice President of Zimbabwe.
She has a BA in Social Work, MA in International Relations and Forced Migration Summer School course at Oxford University. In the UK, she started working in a sandwich factory, army barracks, care homes and then decided to train as a social worker. She worked in the local authority social care from 2004 until 2017 when she decided to do her PhD.
Despite her adversity of losing seven family members in 13 years, Alice wrote a book DEAR GOD FROM YOUR POACHED EGG BREAST about her breast cancer experience in 2007, chemotherapy and mastectomy while studying. She continues to advocate for breast cancer awareness in women with interviews on BBC and grassroots community group. She is standing as a Councillor Candidate in Reading in the UK May 2021 elections.
“You can lose everything, but nobody can take your education away.” part of the speech of Alice speaking to OU graduates when she was receiving the Masters Honorary Award from Open University https://youtu.be/9TsHg2dVGHY

Charlotte Mueller is a Ph.D. Researcher in the Migration and Development Research Group at the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance/ UNU-MERIT. Her main research interests focus on return migration, reintegration, diasporas, and knowledge transfer. For her PhD-Research, Charlotte explores the conditions for knowledge transfer and organisational change in the context of a temporary return programme. A German national, she has lived, worked and studied in Germany, Ecuador, and the Netherlands. Charlotte is experienced in qualitative data collection in countries such as Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, Mexico, Sierra Leone and Somalia.

Dr Muhidin is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia. He is a demographer by training from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has actively been working on the study of migration/population mobility issues and its consequences in different settings such as Asia (Indonesia and Bangladesh), West Africa (Burkina Faso and Ghana) and Australia. In addition, he has also involved in researches related with health and population dynamics. Dr Muhidin was one of the contributors to the background research papers for the 2009 Human Development Reports, UNDP.

Dr Muhidin is also the Executive Board member of the Indonesian Diaspora Network (IDN) Global, which facilitates and empowers the voice of Indonesian diaspora communities through its current 60 national and local chapters and the number is progressively expanding.

I'm a cultural studies researcher using methods of cultural anthropology. My current research explores amateur music ensembles in activist spaces and discourses on belonging, integration, and citizenship. During fieldwork, I have used audio, video and mapping techniques to record different types of ethnographic data and conducted qualitative social media discourse analyses. My overall research interest is understanding the role, use, and voice of performance in transnational activism on rights.

I am a senior researcher at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. My research focusses on international migration and urban developments and, more broadly, on the interrelation of materiality and sociality in late modern societies. I habilitated at the Department of Geography, University of Bremen, Germany, in 2019 (venia legendi “Humangeographie”) and obtained my PhD at Bielefeld University, Germany, in 2013. In 2017, I was a Visiting Academic at the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK. My most recent book is on the nexus of migration, materility and identity ("Migration, Materialität und Identität. Verortungen zwischen Hier und Dort", published in German in 2020, Steiner Verlag).

Professor of Political Sociology

Lea Müller-Funk is currently a Research Fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, where her research focuses on migration aspirations and drivers in (forced) migration, migration and refugee governance, and diaspora politics with a geographical focus on the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Previously, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. She earned a joint PhD in Comparative Politics and Arabic Studies (summa cum laude) from the Centre des Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris and the Department for Near Eastern Studies at Vienna University in 2016. Methodologically, she applies different approaches including in-depth and life history interviews, survey research, mixed methods, content analysis, and online ethnography.

Before her PhD, she was a trainee at the Department of the European Council and the Council of the European Union at the Austrian Foreign Ministry (2010-2011). She attended Vienna University (BA in Political Science, 2009; Magister in Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2010), the Institut National des Langues et Cultures Orientales in Paris (2007/2008), and Sciences Po Paris (MA in Comparative Politics / Middle East and Muslim World, 2010). Lea has held research affiliations to the Institut français du Proche-Orient Beirut (2018), the Migration Reseach Center at Koç University (2018), Nuffield College (2017), the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (2012) and the American University Beirut (2009).

Shepherd Mutsvara is pursuing a joint doctorate program in Political Sciences and Administration with the Pedagogical University of Krakow and Ghent University. His research project focuses on the effects of economic liberalization on refugee movements in Sub-Saharan Africa. It seeks to establish if economic liberalization has become a serious form of economic persecution which International Law should take into consideration in the adjudication of asylum claims.