Experts Database

Francesca Rondine graduated cum laude in 2015 in International Studies (LM-52) at the University of Naples "l'Orientale", with a thesis in International protection of migrants on Female Genital Mutilation as a form of persecution.
She obtained an LL.M. (Master of Law) in 2017 in International Migration and Refugee Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, with a thesis on the administrative detention of migrants in Italian hotspot structures. The thesis has been nominated for the "Hanneke Steenberg" price, a yearly price for the best thesis on migration law written in the Netherlands.
In 2017 she obtained a research fellowship at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA). In 2018 she taught a legal and social sciences research methodology course at the UvA at the PPLE course (Politics, psychology, law and economics).
From July 2018 to July 2019 she worked as a case-worker at the Italian Dublin Unit, civil liberties and immigration department of the Italian Ministry of the Interior. She started working at the Dublin Unit again in 2021. From 2019, she is a PhD candidate in international order and human rights at the University la Sapienza of Rome. Her PhD thesis deals with airport transit zones, namely on their role in migration management, focussing on the issues of migrants’ entry on national territory, detention, expulsion and asylum. The thesis takes into account international law, European law and the Italian context.
Her main areas of interest are, inter alia, right to asylum, migrants’ detention and right to personal liberty and border management.

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. Mariana Rosca has been enrolled in the Ph.D. program on Human Rights: Ethical, Social, and Political Challenges funded by Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie COFUND Programme, where she focusses on social integration of religious minorities. Born in Moldova, living in different countries within and outside Europe, much of Mariana’s personal interests, academic passion and intellectual curiosity have revolved around diaspora communities, migration, religious minorities and social integration. She holds a BA in Economy and Sociology from Academy of Economic Studies, Republic of Moldova, a MA in Global Development and Social Justice from St. John´s University, New York and a second Master in Advanced European and International Studies from European Institute, France.

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.

My work is located at the intersections of sociology of childhood and materialist feminist thought, with a focus on unequal childhoods, migration and stratified social reproduction. It contributes to key debates about the politics of children and childhood; changing adult-child relations in the context of neo-liberal migration and welfare regimes; and how and to what effect children are involved in migration processes.

Anna Maria Rosinska (formerly Kordasiewicz) is a policy analyst at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, Demography and Migration Unit. Formerly a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at that Ca' Foscari University of Venice (2018-2023) and a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell (2018-2020). She had worked at the Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw. Her previous projects were: "MAJORdom. Intersections of class and ethnicity in paid domestic and care work: theoretical development and policy recommendations based on the study of 'majority workers' in Italy and in the USA" (2018-2022) and 'Mig/Ageing: Unfinished migration transition and ageing population in Poland: Asynchronous population changes and the transformation of formal and informal care institutions'. Anna does research in Sociology and Qualitative Social Research.

I’m Sopiko Rostiashvili, enthusiastic about migration. In 2020, with my fellow activists established the first refugee-led youth organisation Echo of Diversity and currently I’m a board member. My academic work had been significantly improved in 2021 by two meaningful programs: Erasmus+ at Cote d’Azur University, where I have started working on my master thesis and have graduated at Ilia State University “Svani migrants’ self-assertion practices in Dmanisi, Georgia”. Furthermore, Swedish Institution SAYP module of migration and integration leaded by Gothenburg University and working on follow-up project. Currently I’m youth-lead mentor at World Vision International and mentoring volunteers, who work with young migrants.

PD Dr. Stefan Rother is a senior researcher at the Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institute for socio-cultural research, and lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg, Germany. In the winter term 2019/20 he acted as interim professor (Vertretungsprofessur) at the Chair of International Politics, University of Freiburg. His research focus is on international migration, global governance, social movements, regional integration and non-/post-Western theories of international relations. He was previously a fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) and researcher and editorial manager of the “International Quarterly for Asian Studies”. In 2019, he was co-convener of the International Fellow Group “Migration, Mobility and Forced Displacement” at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), University of Ghana.
In 2019, he completed his cumulative habilitation on „Multi-level Governance from below? Migrant Civil Society and the Democratisation of International Institutions”. Rother received his doctorate at the Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg with the thesis “Diffusion in transnational political spaces: Political activism of Philippine labor migrants in Hong Kong". He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Southeast Asia as well as participant observation at global governance fora and civil society parallel and counter-events at the UN, ILO, ASEAN and WTO-level as well as European Forum on Migration and World Social Forum on Migration. Stefan Rother has published articles in Third World Quarterly, Cooperation and Conflict, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Globalizations, European Journal of East Asian Studies, International Migration, Migration Studies, the German Journal for Political science (ZPol) and several edited volumes. He is a board member of the German Association for Asian Studies (DGA) and speaker of the working group on migration in the German political science association (AK Migrationspolitik in der DVPW). His latest monograph is “Democratization through Migration? Political Remittances and Participation of Philippine Return Migrants” (Lexington 2016, with Christl Kessler).

Susan Rottmann obtained her B.A. degree in Comparative Religion from Cornell University in 2001, her M.A. degree in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006, and her Ph.D. degree in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012. Her research specialties are ethics, globalization, migration, transnationalism, gender, religion and politics in Europe and the Middle East. Dr. Rottmann has received several major research grants, including a Fulbright-Hays DDRA and grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American Research Institute in Turkey and the Institute of Turkish Studies.