Presenters
Annika Rabo is professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. She has conducted fieldwork in the Middle East, mainly in Syria, since the late 1970s focusing on a variety of topics related to state-citizens relationships. She is currently involved in projects focusing transnational connections and has recently finished a project on transnational Syrian families and family law.
Carmen Caruso received her MA in Gender Studies from the SOAS and her PhD in Political Science from the University of Catania. She has recently completed a research project, developed through a gender lens, as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS (2010-2011). In particular, I conducted an empirical research on the role of women in the Lebanese diaspora in the UK. My interests span gender theory, migration, diaspora, postcolonial studies and include transnationalism, identity and citizenship. Often in my works I have tried to bring these different interests into productive contact.
Adele Galipo is a PhD Candidate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva. She holds a Master of Arts in Development Studies from IHEID, a Bachelor in International Relations from the University of Palermo and a Certificate of Political Studies from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Toulouse. Her main fields of interests are Migration, Transnationalism, Armed Conflict and International Development Cooperation. Her area of interest is the Horn of Africa, particularly Somaliland and Somalia where she has conducted different fieldworks. She speaks Italian, English and French.
Bård Helge Kårtveit is an anthropologist by training. He has worked with the Middle East, and in particular Palestine, since 2000 conducting studies on youth culture, emigration, homeland – diaspora relations, and the politics of religion in the Arab world. After completing his PhD at the University of Bergen in August 2010, he has been teaching Middle East studies with a focus on history, political science and anthropology at the University of Oslo. As of January 2012, he works as a researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway.
Carlos Gustavo Villela holds a BA in Business Management from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He holds an MA and is pursuing his Ph.D from the Institute of Development Research & Development Policy (IEE) of the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) in Germany. His working thesis is "Understanding the Side Effects of Institutionalized Collective Remittances". In 2008 he was awarded a Master Administration from the School of Government at the University of Western Cape in the Republic of South Africa. In 2009 he carriedout a nine months field research in the cities of Los Angeles, San Jose,Fort Worth and Chicago in USA, as well as Zacatecas, Valparaiso, Nochistlan, and Juchipila in Mexico.
Svenja Gertheiss is a research associate and PhD candidate at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany. She is a member of the research area “Private Actors in the Transnational Sphere” which analyses the roles of private actors in governance arrangements for just peace. Her research interests include Middle Eastern diaspora communities, national identity, and qualitative methods. Svenja has taught an introductory IR class at the University of Duisburg-Essen after graduating in Political Science from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2008.
Alice Crabtree is currently undertaking a Masters of Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut and is expected to graduate in June 2012. She has previously studied at the Australian National University in Canberra, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (International Relations) in 2009. During her time at ANU, she was a researcher for the Embassy of the Syrian Arab Republic, assessing Australian-Syrian diplomatic ties. She has experience working in the field of International Education, having worked for an Australian Federal Government scholarship program and for two international education agencies.
Dr Hedda Haugen Askland is a Norwegian anthropologist working at The University of Newcastle, Australia. Hedda’s research interests include issues related to refugees, exile, human rights, democracy, conflict resolution, development, and political, social and cultural change. Her PhD research focuses on issues related to the East Timorese community in Melbourne, Australia. Her PhD thesis explores how political unrest and national crisis affect exiles’ experiences of self, community and nation. Hedda has also conducted research that more specifically focuses on issues facing young asylum seekers. She is currently employed as a Research Associate at the School of Architecture and Built Environment where she is engaged in projects related to creativity, architecture and design, cultural heritage and identity.
Dr. Banu Senay is a MacArthur Research Fellow in Anthropology at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She completed her PhD at Macquarie University, Sydney, in 2010. Her PhD research, titled Beyond Turkey’s Borders: Long-distance Kemalism, State Politics and the Turkish Diaspora involved a study of Turkish secularism and nationalism in Australia. Based on fieldwork amongst Turkish immigrants in Sydney, the research investigated both the political transnationalism engineered by the Turkish State to politicize and mobilize Turks in Australia, and the bottom-up politics engaged in by militant Turkish secularists themselves in their production of long-distance nationalism. Banu has taught in the Anthropology and Sociology Departments at Macquarie University.
Huma Haider is a Research Fellow at the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre, based at the University of Birmingham, England. She works with conflict, humanitarian and development advisors in donor agencies and conducts policy research on conflict, peacebuilding, justice and human rights. She is a licensed attorney (New York State Bar) and worked previously in the Prosecution Support Section of the War Crimes Chamber, Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). She has also researched into issues of refugee / IDP return, coexistence and reconciliation in BiH. Huma is particularly interested in transitional justice in the context of peacebuilding, coexistence and reconciliation in divided societies; as well as the role of refugees/ IDPs and diaspora communities in transitional justice and peacebuilding.
Isabel Ruck is a PhD Candidate at Sciences Po Paris. She obtained her MA in International Conflict Analysis from the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies. In 2009 she worked in a consultancy company to the European Union before moving on to a PhD in International Relations. Her current research focuses on the role of religion in politics. Isabel also teaches at Sciences Po and the Reims Management School in the field of World- and Geopolitics.
Cornelia Epuras recently completed her LLM degree in International Human Rights Law at the University of Essex, United Kingdom, with a thesis on Minorities issues in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries. She obtained my Bachelors of Law from University of Bucharest , where she simultaneously studied for a diploma in European Juridical Sciences delivered by the University Paris I .In early 2012, she will begin work as an intern for the Arab Centre for the Development of the Rule of Law and Integrity (ACRLI) based in Beirut.
Christoph Schumann is Professor of Middle East Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. His research focuses on the contemporary ideological developments in the Middle East and Middle Eastern diasporas in the West. His publications include Radical Nationalism in Syria and Lebanon, 1930–1958, Hamburg: Orient-Institute 2001 (in German); Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean: Late 19th Century until the 1960s, (ed.), Leiden: Brill Publishers 2008; “Political ‘Articulation’ in the Diaspora: Media, Language, and ‘Dialogue’ in the Case of Arab-Americans”, Diaspora: Journal of Transnational Studies 13: 2-3 (2004); “A Muslim 'Diaspora' in the United States?” in: The Muslim World 97: 1 (2007).
Iain Walker is an anthropologist who has worked on age systems, marriage and ritual production of spatial belonging in the Comoro Islands; networks and mobilities among Comorians and Hadrami Yemenis in the western Indian Ocean, and identity among the Comorian community of Zanzibar. He is currently working on convergences across the Hadrami diaspora in the Gulf states and East Africa, as well as in Yemen. He is based in COMPAS at the University of Oxford.
Bahar Baser has been a PhD student at the European University Institute in Florence since 2008. She graduated in Political Science and International Relations (2005) from Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey) and holds an MA in Peace and Conflict Research (2007) from Uppsala University (Uppsala, Sweden). Her interests are nationalism, conflict resolution, third party mediation, migration and diaspora studies. She has published several articles on the role of diasporas as peacemakers, third party mediation in Nagorno Karabakh, political violence in Sri Lanka, and the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. Her PhD thesis title is “Inherited Conflicts and Contentious Diaspora Spaces: Second Generation Kurds and Turks in Germany and Sweden“.
Mari-Liis Jakobson is lecturer in general political science and a PhD student at Tallinn University, Estonia. In 2009-2011 she was a research fellow in the EC Research DG 7th framework programme project "TRANS-NET: Transnationalisation, Migration and Transformation: Multi-Level Analysis of Migrant Transnationalism". The topic of her PhD thesis concerns the transformation of state-citizen relationship in the context of transnationalisation, but her research interests include transnationalism/globalization studies and sociology of citizenship and civil society more broadly.
Eleonora Castagnone holds a PhD in Sociology at the University of Milan, a Masters’ degree in Management of Development at the ITC of the ILO of Turin, and an advanced degree in Social Anthropology at the University of Turin. Currently a researcher and project manager at FIERI, she coordinates various international surveys and qualitative studies. Her research focuses on migrant’s organizations and development between destination and origin countries; transnationalism and remittances; entrepreneurship, economic integration and labor trajectories in receiving labour markets; migrants’ mobility patterns between Africa and Europe (with a special interest
Hung Cam Thai (Berkeley PhD in Sociology) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at Pomona College and the Claremont University Consortium, where he concurrently serves as Chair of Sociology and Director of the Pacific Basin Institute. His scholarship focuses on transnational families and has been funded by over 35 grants and fellowships, including sources such as the Freeman Foundation, Haynes Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Hewlett Foundation, Asia Research Institute of Singapore, and the Pacific Rim Fellowship Program. His first book, For Better or for Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy, is a study of international marriages linking women in Vietnam and overseas Vietnamese men living in the diaspora. His current book, Insufficient Funds: Monetary and Migratory Flows in Low Wage Transnational Families, focuses on variations in how and why people spend, give, and receive money from kin networks across international borders. Professor Thai has given more than 75 lectures worldwide.
Inga Brandell is a senior lecturer in political science at Södertörn högskola and a researcher at Uppsala University. She has written extensively on North African countries' politics and relations to Europe. She directed a larger research project on borders and boundaries in the Middle East (State Frontiers in the Middle East, I.B.Tauris 2006) and also worked as deputy director at the Swedish Institute in Alexandria, Egypt. She has mainly written on the issue of labour migration in the context of the Algerian-French relations and is currently participating in the collective project "Unbound State? The Nation-State and the Departed Populations in the Middle East.”
Thomas Richard is a PhD candidate at the Université d'Auvergne and is currently teaching political science, geopolitics, political philosophy and epistemology with a Middle East specialization. His dissertation covers war representation and perception between the West and the Middle East focusing on how war is understood, remembered, reconstructed and how it can be used as a political tool of mobilization in the Middle East. His main research interests are war, media, memory, representation, history and identity.
Viviana Premazzi is second year Phd student in Sociology at the Graduate School in Social, Economic and Political Sciences of the University of Milan and Junior Researcher at FIERI (International and European Forum for Migration Research) (www.fieri.it ). She is interested in migration and social media, particularly focusing on second generation's youth practices and other intersections between technology and multicultural and multi-religious society.
Ilka Vari-Lavoisier graduated in Political Science at Science Po Aix-en-Provence. Since then she received her master's degree in Social Science from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris in 2010. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and Economics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (E.N.S. Ulm, Paris) and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (I.R.D., Dakar). She currently focuses on the impact of migrants’ organizations along migratory paths, in a perspective of political economy. To address those stakes, her dissertation develops an original research design fitting within the scope of a transnational and interdisciplinary conceptual framework.
Philipp Bruckmayr is currently a PhD. Candidate in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Vienna, studying the impact of global Islamic flows on Cambodia’s Muslim minority. He has been awarded the third price of the Young Scholar Awards of the ISIM Review (Leiden) in 2007, has contributed to the Muslim Civilization Abstracts Program of the Aga Khan University (London) in 2008 and was Junior Fellow at the International Research Centre Cultural Studies (IFK-Vienna) in 2010/2011. He is visiting scholar and lecturer at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (University of Passau) and the Institute for Ethnic Studies (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia) in 2011/2012. A board and academic council member of the Research Association for Continental American and Caribbean Studies and Culture (KonaK-Vienna), he has published inter alia on Islam in Indochina, Syro-Lebanese migration to Latin America and the Caribbean, and the intersections of Islamic scholastic theology and Sufism.
M. Scott Solomon is Associate Professor of Government and International Affairs at the University of South Florida. He received his Ph.D. from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2002 and his M.A. in International Studies from the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1995. He is the co-author (with Martin Griffiths and Steven Roach) of Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations (Routledge, 2009) and (with Mark Rupert) of Globalization and International Political Economy: The Politics of Alternative Futures (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). His current research centers on migration and development, particularly the issues of state initiated migration policies for remittance generation, policy responses to brain drain, and medical migration. He is the Principal Investigator of a multi-year University of South Florida Sustainable, Healthy Communities grant investigating medical migration from Ecuador, Jamaica, and the Philippines.
Cynthia Salloum is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. Her research interests include the study of National States, government and governance, with a focus on diaspora studies. Her dissertation examines the degree to which diasporas are an actor of international relations, as well as the extent to which their role in the political incorporation of minorities is enhanced within the global era. She focuses in comparative politics on the Lebanese diaspora in four countries: France, the United States of America, Mexico and Brazil. She has worked in 2009-2010 as an intern in the department of International Migrations and Minorities at the French National Institute for Demographical Studies (INED). She completed in 2011 a fellowship at the Social Science Research Council in New York (SSRC) and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Political Science Department of Boston College. Since September 2010, Cynthia is providing in addition to her research a doctoral seminar teaching of political theory at the EHESS and she is affiliated to the Research Institute for Strategic Studies of the Military School (IRSEM, French Ministry of Defence, Paris).