Former visiting scholars and student researchers

Former visiting scholars at AMIS

Albert Mora holds a PhD in Sociology, has one degree in Sociology and another one in Social Work, all of them coursed at the University of Valencia. He has worked in several non-governmental organizations and some public administrations, such as Doctors of the World in the Valencian Community (where he was the coordinator of the Center for Health and Social care for Immigrant People) or the CeiMigra Foundation (where he was head of the Intercultural Citizenship School). He has also worked as a practitioner trainer in the field of migration, cultural diversity management, interculturalism, and citizenship participation

Currently, he teaches sociology, methods and techniques of social research, and cooperation development at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the University of Valencia (Spain). He is a member of the Human Rights Institute of the University of Valencia and has been a researcher on different projects funded by the Spanish Government.

He has been visiting scholar at the Andean Program of Human Rights (Andean University Simón Bolivar of Ecuador, 2010), the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (University of Copenhagen, 2017) and the Research Unit on Citizenship and Integration (Aarhus University, 2018).

From September to December 2021 Albert will be a Visiting Scholar at AMIS.

Annika Lindberg holds a PhD in sociology and is joining AMIS as a visiting postdoctoral researcher (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation) from 2020-21. 

Her doctoral research project, 'Governing the deportation limbo', traced the enforcement of policies designed to deter and control deportable migrants via an ethnography of detention and departure centres in Denmark and Sweden.

Her current research focuses on the use of spatial, temporal and social forms of regulating migrants and marginalised citizens, and she is further interested in issues of border and migration control, social welfare regulation and inequality, and street-level bureaucracy. 

She is co-author of the collaborative ethnography Migrants Before the Law: Contested Migration Control in Europe (2019) and of the report Stop Killing us Slowly: A research report on the motivation enhancement measures and criminalisation of rejected asylum seekers in Denmark (with the Freedom of Movements Research Collective, 2018).

Ditte Shapiro joined AMIS as a guest researcher from the Center for Social Work and Administration at University College Absalon in Roskilde, Denmark, where she is an associate professor in Psychology. Ditte has an M.Sc. in Psychology from Copenhagen University and a PhD in Refugee Studies from Roskilde University specializing in the lived experiences of Syrian asylum-seeking families and the social process of rebuilding everyday life in changing contexts.

At AMIS in the winter of 2019, Ditte was working on a research project focusing on the pathways of refugees towards self-reliance in which she along with Rikke Egaa Jørgensen, PhD explored the nexus of immigration and labour regimes in Denmark. In the research project, Rikke and Ditte explore how refugees navigate complex state connections and expectations of self-reliance in which they work with an understanding of hyper-precarity as ambiguous processes producing subjectivities of not only victimization and despair but also fragile spaces of sociality, hope and resistance.

Ditte´s research interests are forced migration, the everyday lives of refugees, social agency and vulnerability, social work in local communities and civil society organizations, and mental health and psychosocial support. Previously Ditte has worked within the Danish Red Asylum Department with a focus on asylum-seeking families and children, assessment and psychosocial intervention.

Frowin Rausis holds a MA in Sociology (University of Bern) and a CAS in European Union Law (University of Zurich). Currently, he is a PhD candidate and affiliated to the Department of Political Science at the University of Lucerne (CH) as well as a research fellow at the National Center of Competence in Research for migration and mobilities studies.

In his research project The Invention of Safe Countries, he studies the spread of policies that restrict access to asylum. Thereby, he focuses on the diffusion mechanisms that led to the adoption of safe country policies in Denmark, Switzerland, and South Africa.

Frowin Rausis is joining AMIS as a visiting scholar between February and June 2022.

İbrahim Berkan Karataş is a researcher and doctoral student based at Marmara University, Department of Sociology. He is also instructor in Center for Economic, Political, Strategic Research.  His research interests mainly center around contemporary social and cultural theory, critical science studies, the sociology of migration, critical migration studies, the Turkish migration and citizenship policies, hospitality, civil society actors, and disadvantaged groups in Turkey.

At AMIS, İbrahim presented the findings of his latest fieldwork as part of his thesis, ‘The Sociological Problematics of Hospitality in Turkey: The State, NGOs, and Syrians.’ The study focuses on the patterns and criticisms of hospitality towards Syrians by utilizing the insights of NGOs (in particular rights and faith-based), as well as analyzing the socio-legal and political reflections of current policies in Turkey. İbrahim guested AMIS between 9-13 October 2023.

Kif Augustine-Adams is Ivan Meitus Chair and Professor of Law at Brigham Young University Law School in the United States. She received her juris doctorate magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. Her scholarship focuses on intersections among citizenship, immigration, gender, and race. With a colleague, she created the Immigration and Refugee Initiative that took law students to volunteer in a US immigration detention center where they helped women and children fleeing violence navigate the legal process of a credible fear interview as a step toward claiming asylum under US law. Her recent scholarship on migration includes “Sites of (Mis)Translation: The Credible Fear Process in United States Immigration Detention” (with Carolina Núñez), 35 Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 399 (2021). 

During her visit at AMIS from January through May 2023, Kif’s primary research focus will be on the experiences in United States government custody of more than 266,000 irregular migrant and refugee children who arrived in the US unaccompanied or whom the government separated from family members between 2014 and 2020.

Kristine Graneng is a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. She holds a MA in European Studies from NTNU. Her research interest primarily lies in the politicization of the EU, particularly how migration in recent years have been increasingly linked to attitudes toward European integration. In her PhD project, she examines to what extent and how migration has been debated in four referendums on EU-related issues in Ireland, Denmark and the UK.

Kristine is staying with AMIS in March 2022. During her stay in Copenhagen, Kristine will be working on a case study of migration discourses in the Danish referendum on the Justice and Home Affairs opt-out in 2015.

Martin Joormann completed his PhD in Sociology of Law with his thesis Legitimized Refugees (2019, Lund University). He is the author of publications such as Asylstaffetten – A longitudinal Ethnographic Study of Protest Walks against the Detention of Asylum Seekers in Sweden, (2018, Justice Power and Resistance) and Refugees and the Violence of Welfare Bureaucracies in Northern Europe (2020, Manchester University Press, co-edited together with Dalia Abdelhady and Nina Gren).

Martin serves as editor for several international journals, and he is currently conducting research for his VR International Postdoc, which is based at Lund's Sociology of Law Department. This postdoc project is a collective case study of Danish, German and Swedish appeal instances that decide on the review of rejected asylum claims. The study’s point of departure is to explore the varying extents to which these appeals are politicized in Denmark, Germany and Sweden.

From August 2021 to July 2023, Martin will be a Visiting Scholar at AMI.

Mirjam Wajsberg joins AMIS as a guest research from Radboud University (NL) where she is a second-year PhD researcher. Her PhD project takes place between Germany and Greece and focuses on mobility trajectories of people on the move in the EU. Her research interests include border studies, citizenship, criminalization of solidarity & migration and urban social activism. Mirjam graduated from AMIS in 2017. Previously she obtained a BA in History from Freiburg University in Germany.

Rebecka Söderberg is a PhD student in her final year at Malmö University, at the research centre Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM). She holds a MA degree in European Ethnology from University of Copenhagen. Her doctoral thesis explores how urban diverse neighbourhoods are problematised in Danish and Swedish urban and integration policies. Furthermore, based on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores how residents in a multi-ethnic public housing neighbourhood in Copenhagen, Denmark, experience their neighbourhood and interventions for social mix, which are taking place as a result of the ‘ghetto legislation’. Currently, she is working on a paper that emphasises how the discursive, material and psychological violence of un-homing affects residents on multiple scales. Rebecka joins AMIS as a visiting scholar from October 2022 to January 2023.

Sarah Louise Madsen is a PhD researcher from the Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies, SDU, and is working on a Ph.D.-thesis on rejected asylum seekers’ encounters with the Danish health care system. With a special focus on knowledge production and medical experts’ role in the construction (and deconstruction) of asylum-seekers refugee status, her research traces rejected asylum seekers and health care personnel’s navigation of a system characterised by deep-seated mutual mistrust.

Sarah holds an MA in Global Refugee Studies from AAU, for which she conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria. She has extensive work experience in the humanitarian, development and human rights sectors in Denmark and the Middle East. She spent a year and a half working in the occupied Palestinian territory and has worked with asylum seekers and refugees for over a decade.

Tamar Todria holds MA degree in European Studies, currently she is a PhD candidate in European Studies at Institute for European Studies, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. Her thesis is on assessing how asylum seekers are treated in Southern European Countries, how migration policy effects them directly. As a case study is used example of Mediterranean basin. She has got Erasmus + Jean Monnet MEDiterranean border crises and European External Action  EUMedEA grant and she has conducted field visit in Sicily.

She joins AMIS as a visiting scholar in May 2022.

Aim of the research stay will be to get acquainted with and investigate recent developments in Danish Asylum System to draw comparison with the similar policy in the Mediterranean context.

Tamar is a member of Research Editorial Committee of EuropeNow published by Council for Europena Studies (CES) at Columbia university and is a member of IMISCOE PhD Board Network.

Valentine Ibeka joins AMIS as a guest PhD researcher from the School of Environment – University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has two bachelor’s degrees – the first, in Philosophy and the second, in Religion and Cultural Studies. He later obtained an MA in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen and an MSc in International Development Management from the University of Nottingham. His current research attempts to explore the intersection between education, migration and development, by comparatively examining the post-study lives of educational and highly skilled migrants across two locations namely Denmark and New Zealand.

Areas of research interest include – Educational Migration, Migration and Development, Remittances, Integration Policies, Neo-colonialism and World Systems Analysis, Internationalization of Higher Education, Pierre Bourdieu, John Rawls.

Former student researchers at AMIS

Emile May Young is a third-semester MA student with AMIS and is currently working as a research intern on the DIGINAUTS project hosted by Marie Sandberg and Nina Mollerup. Within the larger scope of the project, Emile focuses on the types of knowledge produced through the use of social media and mainstream media by migrants and journalists alike. Her general research interests are in media, images, and storytelling. Emile holds a BA in English literature, archaeology, and classics from New York University.

Emilía Ward is a third-semester MA student with AMIS and is currently working as a research intern anthropologist and an affiliate of Lotte Pelckmans. Emilía assists with editing a special issue of the Journal of Anthropology and Development (APAD) centring on African receptions to EU security and migration-development-security nexus in the Sahel as well as its connection to the EU’s increased externalization of border controls and securitization of African migration. Emilía holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Iceland.

Mette Catarina Skaarup is a third-semester MA student with AMIS and is currently working as a research intern on the DIGINAUTS project hosted by Marie Sandberg and Nina Mollerup. As part of her internship, Mette will explore productions of the Danish-Swedish borderland through various discursive and digital practices. She will also assist with the organization of academic conferences and the establishment of a student research network for migration-interested students in Copenhagen and Malmö. Mette holds a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from Malmö University.