Fiona-Katharina Seiger
Production
Fiona is a sociologist by training who worked with women, children, and youth in Japan and the Philippines. She holds a PhD from the National University of Singapore. Her education and research career have brought Fiona to Vienna, Paris, Kyoto, Tokyo, Manila, Singapore, Antwerp, Rotterdam, and to the North of Italy. Consequently, she developed a strong desire to build bridges and speak across the regional and linguistic cocoons in which academic research takes place and discussions take shape. To reach a wider audience and make academic research more accessible, Fiona initiated The IMISCOE Migration Podcast. Since April 2023, she works to provide evidence for policy-making.
Kate Dearden
Production
Kate works as a project coordinator for Population Europe in Berlin, where she focuses on dissemination and communication of research findings related to migration and demography. Before that, she worked at IOM's Migration Data Centre (GMDAC) predominantly on the Missing Migrants Project, for which she worked to document and to raise awareness and about the risks faced by migrants on irregularized migrant journeys through quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. She has volunteered, studied and worked on the topic of migration since 2008 at the local/national levels in Canada, India, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland and Germany. She has an academic background in sociology and political science and is happy bringing together and working across policy, academic and civil society spheres.
Milena Belloni
Team & Programming Coordinator
Milena is an ethnographer specialised in migration and refugee studies, currently working as Assistant Research Professor at the University of Antwerp. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Italy, Belgium and Holland. Her research mainly concerns refugees’ migration dynamics and inclusion pathways, transnational refugee families, migrant smuggling, protracted displacement in Europe and in the Global South, home and housing studies, and ethnographic methods. She published in several international peer reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Refugee Studies, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Global Networks. Her monographic study on the migration of Eritreans to Europe, The Big Gamble, is published by the University of California Press (2019).
She holds a PhD from the University of Trento. In 2016 her thesis “Cosmologies of Destinations: roots and routes of Eritrean forced migration towards Europe” won the Maria Baganha IMISCOE 2016 Award for the best doctoral dissertation in migration studies.
https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/milena-belloni/
https://unitn.academia.edu/MilenaBelloni
Sarah Vancluysen
Team & Programming Coordinator
Sarah Vancluysen is a FWO post-Doctoral researcher at the Institute of Development Policy, at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. She holds a MA and PhD in Development Studies, also obtained at this Institute. In her post-doctoral project, Sarah studies mobility decision-making in South Sudanese transnational families in the aftermath of the civil war. To better understand the dynamics in border-spanning family networks, she engages in a multi-sited ethnography in locations in Uganda and South Sudan. Also for her PhD, she conducted qualitative research in and around the northern Ugandan refugee settlements. Focussing on transnational families in conflict-affected contexts, Sarah’s interests are situated at the intersection between (forced) migration studies, conflict and development. She also teaches the course ‘International Migration and Development’ to master students in Development Studies. Sarah joined the IMISCOE podcast team, because of her believe in the strength of (good) science communication.
https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/sarah-vancluysen
https://twitter.com/SarahVancluysen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-vancluysen-2804a860/
Asya Pisarevskaya
Financial Administration & Engagement
Asya Pisarevskaya is an Assistant Professor in Migration ad Diversity Governance at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam. She studies governance of migration-related diversities and migrant integration in European cities. She is committed to popularization migration studies and aims to make scientific findings more accessible for broader public. She was involved in creation of the Migration Research Hub, and a number of other practice-oriented projects, such as integrationpractices.eu and anti-discrimination project for the city of Rotterdam. Asya has obtained her PhD in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research at the University of Milan and the University of Turin (Italy).
Amanda Paz Alencar
Interviews
Amanda is a digital migration scholar specialized in the study of media and social media in Europe and Latin America, with a focus on how communication technologies are shaping mobility and sociocultural integration processes of (forced) migrants. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media & Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Vice Chair of the Intercultural Communication Division within the International Communication Association (ICA). Amanda was a Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre (Oxford University) and Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. She has guest edited two special issues in the (open-access) peer-reviewed journals International Communication Gazette and Media and Communication on the intersections between media, communication and forced migration processes.
https://amandaalencar.com/
https://www.eur.nl/en/people/amanda-paz-alencar
Special Thanks
Special thanks to Lou Janssen Dangzalan, Cathrine Talleraas , Roger Norum , and Jørgen Carling for their valuable input during the inception phase of the project. We also would like to thank Jolynna Sinanan, Jamie Coates , and Mamta Sachan Kumar for their work on the initial 3 seasons of The IMISCOE Migration Podcast.