The Rinus Penninx Best Paper Award 2023 has been awarded to Naiara Rodriguez-Pena for her paper on "Aspiring to be ‘here’ and ‘there’: Conflicting intrinsic and instrumental migration aspirations".
Naiara is an early stage researcher within the EJD MOVES project, where she focuses on not (yet) materialized migration aspirations and how these relate to the spatial decision-making process in Europe. Her research investigates the adaptation strategies of those that aspire and have the capabilities for migration but have not materialized these desires into actual mobility.
Naiara holds a MSc in Migration and Ethnic studies (2018, cum laude) and a MSc in Political Economy (2019, cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam. Between 2018 and 2020, she worked for an ERC-funded project on citizen attitudes and perceptions towards the EU and was part of the Migration as Development (MADE) project. While at MADE, she conducted research in the frontier town of Caracaraí, Roraima, in northern Brazil, where she explored the transformations of the town and how social change shaped its migration history.