Network members

Tobias Eule researches how law enables and constrains social change, and has conducted several socio-legal projects on migration law implementation, legal advice and housing precarity. As a professor for the sociology of law, he combines qualitative interpretative research and an avid interest in doctrinal and theoretical legal research.
Contact: tobias.eule@unibe.ch

Charles Heller is SNF Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Bern and Director of Research within the Border Forensics investigation agency. He is a transdisciplinary researcher, filmmaker and human rights activist whose work has a long-standing focus on the politics of migration, borders, mediation and the law within and at the borders of Europe. Heller’s research draws on the disciplines of anthropology and geography, but also on arts and architecture-based methodologies, and engages with the study of politics and the law across disciplines.
Contact: charles.heller@unibe.ch

Anna Wyss is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern with a background in Sociology and Social Anthropology. She is interested in various mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, as well as in the experiences and state administration of migration. Theoretically, she approaches these themes from the perspectives of critical migration and border regime studies, the anthropology and sociology of law, and intersectional perspectives. She is the co-author of the monograph Migrants before the Law (Palgrave, 2019) and the author of Navigating the European Migration Regime (Bristol University Press, 2022).
Contact: anna.wyss@unibe.ch

Alexander Baur is Director of the Department of Criminology, Juvenile Criminal Law and Corrections and holds the Chair of Criminal Law and Criminology.
Contact: alexander.baur@jura.uni-goettingen.de

Irina Barczaitis (she/her) is a doctoral researcher at the Chair of Interculturality and Multilingualism in the Department of Intercultural German Studies. Her research interests lie in the field of intercultural academic communication and the promotion of resources in university educational processes.
Contact: irina.barczaitis@phil.uni-goettingen.de

Reza Bayat is postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Global Migration Studies (CeMig).
Contact: reza.bayat@uni-goettingen.de

Sebastian Benedikt is a PhD candidate and member of the Laboratory for Critical Migration and Border Regime Research at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology/ European Ethnology. As a socio-legal scholar he focuses on practices of legal mobilization and on (extra-)legal struggles in the EUropean border regime, and how the erosion of the rule of law intersects with the dismantling of migration law and the legal subjectivity of migrants.
Contact: sebastian.benedikt@uni-goettingen.de

Andrea Bogner is Professor for Interculturality and Multilingualism.
Contact: andrea.bogner@phil.uni-goettingen.de

Olaf Deinert holds a chair for Civil Law, Labour Law and Social Law at Göttingen University. His research area is labour law and social law with a focus on the interconnections between these fields. With concern to migration his centers of interest are, among others, private international law in the field of labour law and coordination of social laws.
Contact: Olaf.Deinert@jura.uni-goettingen.de

Gesche Dumiak is PhD student in Intercultural German Studies.
Contact: gesche.dumiak@uni-goettingen.de

Ahmet Güler is PhD student at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology/ European Ethnology.
Contact: ahmethilmi.gueler@stud.uni-goettingen.de

Jelka Günther holds a PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology and has been the academic coordinator of Centre for Global Migration Studies since April 2018. As part of this position, she also coordinates the ENLIGHT Thematic Network "Imagine".br> Contact: jelka.guenther@uni-goettingen.de

Valeria Hänsel is member of the Laboratory for Critical Migration and Border Regime Research at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology/ European Ethnology.
Contact:

Anna Haut is the academic director of Museum Friedland, which focuses on the topics of forced migration and integration from 1945 to the present day. A second permanent exhibition on the migration movements of recent years is currently being developed.
Contact: haut@museum-friedland.de

Sabine Hess has been professor at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology since 2011. Since 2018, she has been director of the Center for Global Migration Studies at the University of Göttingen. As a political anthropologist, she is particularly interested in the social, cultural and political ways of dealing with immigration processes, i.e. how immigration and transit migration are conceptualized and 'governed' locally, nationally and globally. One of her main research areas is the establishment and further development of cultural anthropological border research, including border-drawing processes (racism) within European societies as well as the genesis of an EU "border regime".
Contact: shess@uni-goettingen.de

Christian Hinrichs is a sociologist, PhD candidate and research assistant at the Institute of Sociology. He is writing his doctoral thesis on the dynamics of the biographies of homeless EU citizens from Eastern European countries. Their life stories reveal the effects of institutional exclusion from the German migration and welfare state regimes. His research interests include urban, migration and racism studies.
Contact: christian.hinrichs@uni-goettingen.de

Lars Klein is Senior Lecturer and Course Coordinator (Studiengangskoordinator) of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree "Euroculture - Society, Politics and Culture in a Global Context". In his teaching and research he is interested in the complex of identification - belonging - participation/citizenship in Europe. He is founding board member of the "Center for Global Migration Studies" and has been among the co-applicants of the "Urban Lab - Migration Moves Göttingen" (2019-20).
Contact: lklein@uni-goettingen.de

Sarah Kruck is member of the Laboratory for Critical Migration and Border Regime Research at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology/ European Ethnology.
Contact:

Chnoor Maki is a PhD student at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology. Their research examines the re/construction of borders, as well as the intersections of gender, and race/ethnicity/nationality in the context of migration. Adopting a decolonial perspective on borders, their work centers on the experiences of Kurdish women during their journeys to Europe.
Contact: chnoor.maki@stud.uni-goettingen.de

Alexander-Kenneth Nagel is professor for the social scientific study of religion at the Institute for Sociology. His research interests include migration and religious pluralization, migrant organizations as hubs of welfare production, the management of religious diversity in refugee accommodation centres and patterns of religious change among refugees.
Contact: alexander-kenneth.nagel@sowi.uni-goettingen.de

Annelie Neumann is a PhD student and member of the Laboratory for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology in Göttingen. By combining a legal anthropological perspective with queer theory, she explores the question of how legal regulations are mutually dependent and (re)produce LGBTIQ*-specific pitfalls and are thus embedded in global power relations. Applied to the scene of the European border regime, she examines the hetero- and homonormative as well as homonational character of the European Border Regime. Annelie Neumann is a doctoral fellow of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
Contact: annelie@subbotnik-chemnitz.de

Svenja Schurade is PhD student at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology/ European Ethnology and researcher in the European research project MORE on the European Return and Readmission Policy. Her research is about the implementation and organisation of deportations, about detention and criminalisation, but also about solidarity-based alternatives and counter-strategies. In her work, she combines academic research on power relations and the governance of migration with political involvement for a society based on freedom of movement, equality, liberty and democratic self-determination.
Contact: svenja.schurade@uni-goettingen.de

Saylak Seyma is member of the Laboratory for Critical Migration and Border Regime Research at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology/ European Ethnology.
Contact:

Monica-Elena Stoian is a working-class academic, a sociolinguist and lecturer at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Her research focuses on languages and social practices, intersectionality and migrant identities studies. She also teaches academic writing in multilingual and intercultural contexts and is an activist in a collective body of people who facilitate help and translation for migrants and homeless people.
Contact: monica.stoian@phil.uni-goettingen.de

Timo Weishaupt is Professorship of Sociology with a focus on social policy at the Institute of Sociology.
Contact: timo.weishaupt@sowi.uni-goettingen.de

Anna Louise Weßling studied cultural studies, religious studies and German language and literature. After several years working in the field of intercultural dialogue in the Euro-Mediterranean region, she now works at the Friedland Museum and is in charge of participatory educational and exhibition projects. At the same time, she is doing her doctorate (supervised by the Universities of Vechta and Göttingen) on the effects of the European border regime on the lives of refugee women using Friedland as an example.
Contact: wessling@museum-friedland.de

Minye Wu is PhD student in Intercultural German Studies.
Contact: minyue.wu@uni-goettingen.de

Yin Yu is a PhD student in the Intercultural German Studies Department at the University of Göttingen. Under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Andrea Bogner and Prof. Dr. Judith Purkarthofer, her research focuses on family language policy in Chinese-German-speaking families in Germany. Using a longitudinal ethnographic approach, she examines the interplay of child agency, the impact of formal schooling on family language practices, and family multiliteracies.
Contact: yin.yu@stud.uni-goettingen.de

Soline Ballet is a PhD researcher in Social Work and Political Sciences at Ghent University and is also a member of the interfaculty Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR). Their current research adopts a critical approach to social work practices and paradigms with/for illegalised migrants in Belgium. To this end, they have conducted ethnographic research with various informal and formal social work initiatives, and have complemented this with archival and oral history research. In general, their research interests span from (migrant) solidarity, power/knowledge regimes and migration governance to racial capitalism and (the production of) affect.
Contact: soline.ballet@ugent.be

Marlies Casier is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ghent University's Department of Social Work, where she researches solidarity with people on the move, focussing specifically on the advocacy work of citizens' movements in support of people stuck in European transitzones. She teaches on international migration dynamics and European border policies in the Master of Science in Conflict and Development Studies and the Master in Global Studies at Ghent University. She has PhD in Political Sciences, Masters in Moralphilosophy and Conflict and Development Studies and a bachelor in Social Work.
Contact: marlies.casier@ugent.be

Ellen Desmet is an associate professor of migration law at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of Ghent University, where she founded the Migration Law Research Group (MigrLaw). Her research is situated at the intersection of migration law, human rights and legal anthropology, with a focus on asylum and family reunification.
Contact: ellen.desmet@ugent.be

Hannah Grondelaers is a PhD student at Ghent University’s Social Work and Social Pedagogy Department and is affiliated to the Migration and Social Policy cluster of United Nations University CRIS. Under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ine Lietaert and Prof. Dr. Robin Vandevoordt she conducts research on Ukrainian women’s return trajectories between Belgium and Ukraine. More specifically, she uses multi-scalar ethnography to study how gendered and geopolitical imaginaries on different scales (EU, Belgian/Ukrainian, social work and personal scale) shape the women’s trajectories.
Contact: hannah.grondelaers@ugent.be

Julija Kekstaite is a doctoral researcher in Sociology at Ghent University and a member of the interfaculty Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR). Her work examines migration governance, solidarity, and resistance to state-sanctioned racisms in contemporary Europe. Using ethnographic methods, her current research explores grassroots engagement with illegalised migrants at the Lithuania-Belarus border and the racialised dynamics of migration governance in Lithuania.
Contact: julija.kekstaite@ugent.be

Ine Lietaert is associate professor at the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy where she teaches International Social Work. She combines this with a position at the United Nations University- CRIS, where she coordinates the Migration and Social Policy research cluster. Her research focuses on the interaction between global and regional actors, policies, discourses and regimes, and local social support practices. She particularly focuses on the governance of mobile groups in vulnerable situations (such as asylum applicants, return migrants, and internally displaced persons) and the impact of borders and geopolitics on care practices and social interventions.
Contact: ine.lietaert@ugent.be

Rossella Marino has obtained her PhD in Social Work and Social Pedagogy at Ghent University in September 2023, being also a PhD fellow at UNU-CRIS since 2019. Her research has revolved around European migration governance in The Gambia. For that, she has spent extended fieldwork visits in the West African country. She currently teaches Social Work and Social Pedagogical literature at Ghent university. Prior to her PhD, Rossella was research intern at UNU-CRIS and VUB’s Institute for European Studies (IES).
Contact: rossella.marino@ugent.be

Maud Martens is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy and the Migration Law Research Group of Ghent University. She has a broad interest in socio-legal research on forced migration and is particularly interested in exploring various forms of support, solidarity and activism for, with, and among migrants. In her current research project, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Robin Vandevoordt and Prof. Dr. Ellen Desmet, Maud examines the organisation and implications of socio-legal support for migrants in Northern France.
Contact: maud.martens@ugent.be

Giacomo Orsini teaches courses on migration, race, ethnicity and the politics of diversity in Brussels and has a long postdoctoral career between the UK and Belgium. While Orsini’s most recent research is concerned with the effects of laws and administrative procedures on foreigners' everyday life, he previously conducted research on unaccompanied minors' mobility, institutional racism within family reunification in Belgium, and a series of field investigations in key locations of Europe’s migration regime. His studies concentrate on the (coloniality of the) everyday governance of migration and the multiplication of tangible and intangible borders of (racist) exclusion and inclusion.
Contact: giacomo.orsini@ugent.be

Tancrède Pagès is a Ph.D. fellow at the Department of Social Work and Pedagogy and the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at University of Ghent. He received his ReMa in the Modern History and International Relations program from the University of Groningen. His research interests include solidarity and resistance politics at the urban level, contentious solidarity and humanitarianism, direct/horizontal democracy, and political theory. His current project investigates squats as spaces of solidarity with illegalized migrants and refugees and intersectional identity formation in heterogeneous collectives.
Contact: alexis.pages@ugent.be

Lore Roels (she/her) is a PhD researcher in the Migration Law Research Group and the Gender & Violence Team at the International Centre for Reproductive Health at Ghent University. She is a member of the University’s interfaculty Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR) and the Human Rights Centre (HRC). She holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Master of Laws degree from Ghent University, as well as an LLM degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she specialised in asylum law, law & gender and human rights.
Contact: lore.roels@ugent.be

Robin Vandevoordt is an Associate Professor in Migration studies at CESSMIR. He leads ethnographic research on two topics: social movements in solidarity with people on the move, and the role of different actors entangled in migration and integration policies. Before joining Ghent University, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre and at the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Research on Ecological and Social Change (CRESC).
Contact: robin.Vandevoordt@UGent.be

Floor Verhaeghe is the coordinator of CESSMIR (University’s interfaculty Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees), where she facilitates collaboration across various disciplines within the center and with external partners. Her doctoral research focused on integration and belonging from a multi- and intergenerational perspective. After completing her PhD, she coordinated the 'Childmove' research project, which examined the impact of displacement on the psychosocial well-being of unaccompanied refugee minors.
Contact: floor.verhaeghe@ugent.be

Ruben Wissing is a postdoctoral researcher who studies law from multidisciplinary and critical perspectives. His expertise lies in asylum and refugee law, he teaches Law & Society and is attached to the Migration Law Research Group (UGent).
Contact: ruben.wissing@ugent.be

Kirsti Jõesalu is a Researcher of Ethnology with an interest in social and cultural remembering. She has published on the dynamics of cultural and social memory since 1989, as well as on museums and oral history. Her current research explores the roles, responsibilities, and practices of history museums in creating pluralistic and reflexive spaces for memory work. Together with Ene Kõresaar, she has examined how Baltic history museums address migration and how museums shape migration discourse by influencing perceptions of belonging, citizenship, and inter-ethnic relations.
Contact: Kirsti.joesalu@ut.ee

Leena Käosaar is an Associate Professor of Cultural Theory. Her research interests include Estonian post-Soviet life writing, Estonian prose fiction, 21st-century life writing, Baltic women's deportation narratives, Gulag narratives, women's diaries, and family correspondences. Currently, she is focusing on gathering the life stories of Ukrainian refugees in Estonia to support Ukrainian memory amidst the radical, often traumatic changes and mass migration prompted by Russia's military aggression against Ukraine.
Contact: Leena.kaosaar@ut.ee

Ene Kõresaar is a Professor of Oral History and Memory. She has published on the memory of World War II and Stalinism, the post-communist narrative periodisation of the 20th century, and the dynamics of social and cultural remembering. She has also studied mnemonic processes in oral history, grassroots recognition politics, commemorative journalism, and museums. Her current project concerns the challenges of mnemonic pluralism in Baltic history museums.
Contact: Ene.koresaar@ut.ee

Elo-Hanna Seljamaa is an Associate Professor of Estonian and Comparative Folklore. She has a long-standing interest in ethnic interactions, minorities, and diversity in Estonia, examining how these topics play out and intersect in integration policies, everyday encounters and commemorative practices as well as their representations in museums and art. Her current research focuses on exclusions and inclusions of migrants and minorities in the realm of intangible cultural heritage and on international students, who are both sought after and framed as a threat to national security in contemporary Europe.
Contact: elo-hanna.seljamaa@ut.ee