Research collaboration lies at the heart of the ASYFAIR project. We aim to bring together legal practitioners, charity workers, activists, volunteers, asylum seekers, researchers working on asylum adjudication in Europe, as well as professionals working in asylum adjudication.

If you would like to become part of the research network, please email asyfair@exeter.ac.uk (or click here).

Research Network

Here you can find short biographies and email addresses of members of our research network.

Cevdet Acu

Cevdet Acu is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Exeter. He is interested in economic history, refugee economies and economic development. His focus is on the macroeconomic influence of displaced people on receiving countries. In particular, his research is concerned with the question of how Syrian refugees impact the labour market in host countries (with a focus on Sweden, Jordan, and Lebanon). He also investigates employment barriers when refugees try to find a job in order to better understand the influence of Syrian refugees in these countries. Email: ca377@exeter.ac.uk

Athanasia Andriopoulou

Athanasia Andriopoulou holds a PhD in ‘Democracy and Human Rights’ from the University of Genova (European label), and she is currently conducting a research project at the University of Urbino on ‘The non citizen statute and the crisis of the migration processes in the European space’. Athanasia is used to working in interdisciplinary research projects. Her research interests are focused on social integration through the law, citizenship rights (especially regarding second and third generation immigrants) and – more recently – she is working on the asylum right from a multi-level perspective (Intenational, European and National) and the justifiability of the right to asylum before the Courts under the current immigration crisis. Email: a.andriop@gmail.com

Francesca Ansaloni

Francesca Ansaloni holds a PhD in Regional Planning and Public Policy from the University IUAV of Venice (Italy). Her research investigates the politics of forced migrations from a material and affective perspective; exploring how modes of government – in their articulations with daily practices, narratives, materialities and affects – are challenged and resisted. Her PhD thesis studied the production of orderings and control in a makeshift camp in Calais (France) and how it shaped the political process and framed the possibilities to engage in acts of resistance. Her research is situated at the intersection of urban and migration studies and focuses on camps and informal settlements, refugees, asylum seekers and illegalised migrants, spatial inclusion/exclusion and border making processes. Email: francesca.ansaloni@gmail.com

Lisa Marie Borrelli

Lisa Marie Borrelli is a postdoctoral researcher at the HES-SO Valais within the nccr -> on the move projected ‚Governing Migration and Social Cohesion through Integration Requirements’, led by Christin Achermann and Stefanie Kurt. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the Institute of Sociology at Bern University, for which she studied ambivalent laws and emotions of street-level bureaucrats working on irregular migration in the Schengen Area. This was part of the research project ‘Contested Control at the Margins of the State’ (SNSF financed), in which she conducted ethnographic fieldwork with (border) police and migration authorities in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden, as well as in Lithuania and Latvia. She is co-author of the collaborative ethnography of migration control practices in the Schengen Area (together with Annika Lindberg, Anna Wyss and Tobias Eule, University of Bern), entitled ‘Migrants Before the Law: Contested migration control in Europe’, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. Email: lisa.borrelli@hevs.ch

John R Campbell

John R Campbell is a Reader in the Anthropology of Law and Africa in the Department of Anthropology & Sociology, School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), London. His current interests focus on: refugees, the anthropology of law and magistrates’courts. Recent publications include: ‘Expert evidence in British Asylum Courts: The judicial assessment of evidence on ethnic discrimination and statelessness in Ethiopia’ in Iris Berger, Tricia Redeker Hepner, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Joanna Tague, and Meredith Terretta. Eds. 2015. Law, Expertise, and Protean Ideas about African Migrants. Ohio State University Press. Pp. 201-120; ‘Asylum v sovereignty in the 21st century: How nation-state’s breach international law to block access to asylum’, International Journal of Migration and Border Studies 2016, 2, 1, 24-39; and Bureaucracy, Law and Dystopia in the United Kingdom’s Asylum System. Routledge: N.Y. & Oxford (2017). Email: jc58@soas.ac.uk

Julia Dahlvik

Julia Dahlvik earned her PhD in Sociology at the University of Vienna and is currently researching and teaching at the University of Applied Sciences, FH Campus Vienna (Austria). Her research focuses on organisations, law and society, public administration, and asylum. Her dissertation ‘Inside Asylum Bureaucracy’ was an ethnographic case study on the Austrian asylum administration and is forthcoming with Springer in 2018. She recently published ‘Asylum as construction work: Theorizing administrative practices in Migration Studies’. Email: julia.dahlvik@fh-campuswien.ac.at

Fabio De Blasis

Fabio De Blasis holds a PhD in Global Studies from the University of Bologna, a Master of Science in International Cooperation, Development and Human Rights from the University of Bologna, and a Bachelor Degree in Anthropology from the University of Rome La Sapienza. He has carried out research on rural development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2016 he was hosted as Research Associate at the Development Studies Institute of the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania. He currently works as a social worker with refugees and asylum seekers. He is in charge of a reception center and provides social, sanitary and legal assistance to 30 asylum seekers and refugees in Bologna province. Email: fabiodeblasis@gmail.com

Ellen Desmet

Ellen Desmet is an assistant professor of migration law at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of Ghent University, Belgium. She has a background in human and children’s rights law as well as legal anthropology. She is particularly interested in the interaction between human rights law and migration law from a users’ perspective. A specific research line concerns the position of children and young people in appellate asylum and migration proceedings in Belgium. Ellen is a member of the Human Rights Centre and CESSMIR (Centre of the Social Study of Migration and Refugees). Email: ellen.desmet@ugent.be

Moira Dustin

Moira Dustin is a Research Fellow in the School of Law, Politics and Sociology, working on the SOGICA project. ‘SOGICA – Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Claims of Asylum: A European human rights challenge’ is a four-year project funded by a Starting Grant of the European Research Council (ERC). Moira is responsible for the UK casework on the Project. Moira has a PhD in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics, where she is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE). Before joining the University of Sussex, Moira was Director of Research and Communications at the Equality and Diversity Forum, a network of equality and human rights organisations, where she coordinated the Equality and Diversity Research Network. Moira has also worked at the Refugee Council, providing advice and information and developing national services for refugees and asylum-seekers. She has worked as a freelance sub-editor on the Guardian and Independent newspapers and was the Information Worker for the Carnegie Inquiry into the Third Age. For more information about Moira’s research and publications, please see www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/400858

Valentin Feneberg

Valentin Feneberg studied Political Sciences, Sociology and Philosophy in Munich, Berlin and Oxford and currently works at the Integrated Research Institute Law & Society at Humboldt University. His focus is on interdisciplinary legal studies, conducting research on asylum adjudication and administrative courts, as well as on assisted return policies, particularly on the case of Senegal. In his PhD project he investigates the production and application of country of origin information in asylum appeal cases in Germany, focussing on the specific form of knowledge of COI, its adaption for judicial decision making and how the use of COI by courts influences the change of international protection statuses and, thus, how legal practice affects the political question who counts as refugee. Email: valentin.feneberg@rewi.hu-berlin.de

Sara Forcella

Sara Forcella is a PhD candidate at DSO (Oriental Studies Department) at La Sapienza University of Rome; as well as an educational and cultural operator. Sara holds a Masters degree in Arabic Language and Literature. Since 2012, she also works as a cultural mediator and Italian language teacher for refugees and asylum seekers. Sara deals with cultural mediation in different contexts, including legal, medical and psychological mediation, as well as job orientation. In the last two years, Sara has undertaken two projects of (inter)cultural-artistic activities with migrants to promote cultural and social engagement in their new country or residence. Email: saraforcella@hotmail.it

Elena Giacomelli

Elena Giacomelli is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bologna. During her undergraduate studies in Political Science and International Relations she focused on the roots and dynamics of migration, and its impact on the stability and legitimacy of societies. She then pursued a Masters in European and International Studies at the University of Trento, collaborating with the Third World Studies Center at the University of the Philippines, and focused on environmental migration. She was also part of the research project “Current Migration to Europe: Research of Smart Population Dynamics” at the Metropolitan University of Prague, conducting surveys with migrants in two transit centres in Vienna, Austria. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at University of Bologna, conducting ethnographic research with social workers and asylum seekers. To gain an insight into practice, she worked as a social worker at the Association Centro Astalli for two years, assisting asylum seekers and refugees. She has been selected for a scholarship within the EUROSA program, and spent six months as a visitor researcher at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Next to participating in migration-focused summer schools, she was a speaker at the first annual CESSMIR Conference titled ‘Needs and Care Practices for Refugees and Migrants’ (University of Ghent); at the 4th International Conference ‘Migrants and refugees in the Law’ (Catholic University of Murcia); at the International Conference ‘Migrating World: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Migration and Integration’ (University of Greenwich), and at the 4th Annual Conference ‘Rethinking the “Regional” in Refugee Law and Policy’ (Refugee Law Initiative, University of London). Email: elena.giacomelli10@gmail.com

Chrisa Giannopoulou

Chrisa Giannopoulou received her PhD. from the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies in the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki, Greece) in December 2015. Her thesis focused on the survival strategies of separated asylum-seeking children in Greek reception centres. She has worked with the Asylum Appeals’ Committees in Athens and her work and research experience also include victims of trafficking and regular migrants in Greece. In 2018 she joins a research program at the Department of Geography at the University of Aegean (Mytilene, Lesvos – Greece), titled Refugees’ Right to the city. State reception centres and housing commons: Case studies from Athens, Thessaloniki and Mytilene. She is also part of a research program at the Centre for Research on Womens’ Issues titled Assessments of accessibility and barriers to GBV services in Attica, Northern Greece, islands and Evros regions.

Anthony Good

Anthony Good is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His initial research in South India focused on domestic life-cycle ceremonies, especially those of puberty, marriage, and death. Subsequent field research in a Hindu temple was concerned with the ceremonial economy linking gods, priests and worshippers, as well as with daily and festival worship. He has frequently acted as an expert witness in asylum appeals involving Sri Lankans, and has carried out research on uses of expert evidence in the British asylum courts, and (with Robert Gibb, University of Glasgow) on the conversion of asylum applicants’ narratives into legal discourse in the UK and France. Relevant publications include Anthropology and Expertise in the Asylum Courts (Routledge-Cavendish 2007), ‘Anthropological evidence and Country of Origin Information in British asylum courts,’ pp. 122-44 in Benjamin N. Lawrance & Galya Ruffer (eds), Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status: The Role of Witness, Expertise and Testimony. (Cambridge University Press 2015), Of Doubt and Proof: Ritual and Legal Practices of Judgment (co-edited with Daniela Berti & Gilles Tarabout: Ashgate 2015), and ‘Law and anthropology: legal pluralism and “lay” decision-making,’ pp. 211-238 in Dawn Watkins & Mandy Burton (eds), Research Methods in Law (2nd edition: Routledge 2017). Email: A.Good@ed.ac.uk

Francesca Grisot

Francesca Grisot holds a PhD in Language, Culture and Society from the University of Ca’Foscari, Venice. She travelled alongside asylum seekers from Iran to Norway (2008-2014) conducting ethnographic research for her PhD thesis on asylum narratives of unaccompanied Afghan minors seeking asylum in Europe. She collaborated with the UNHCR project Unaccompanied and separated children on the move in need of international protection; and with ASGI for the report The Dublin system and Italy: A wavering balance; as well as with the ESCAPES Centre of Research on Forced Migration (University of Milan). Since 2008, she focuses on the reception system for asylum seekers and Dublin returnees in Italy, working as a language-culture mediator, legal operator, project writer, project manager and consultant for institutions providing social, sanitary and legal assistance to asylum seekers. She also provided expert advice for the Italy test cases judgement in the UK Upper Tribunal in London, based on data analysis and interviews with asylum seekers, operators, and institutions. Relevant publications include “Visions and narratives: Migrant Stories between Anthropology and Hermeneutics” (2012); “Dublin and Italy: A case study (ASGI Report, 2015); and “Unaccompanied foreign minors between necessity and fate. Interview with Abdul Rostami” (2016). Email: francesca.grisot@unive.it

Cuneyt Gurer

Dr. Gurer is the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation fellow at the University of Siegen and conducting research on “Conflict, Refugees and Dynamics of Integration.” He has received his Ph.D. degree from Department of Political Science at Kent State University, USA (2007). His research interests and areas of expertise are Conflict and Human Displacement, Integration policies, Transnational and Comparative Security Policies. In addition, to teaching and research, he participated to projects with Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), UNICEF and UNODC. He also worked with nongovernmental aid agencies supporting Syrian refugees in Turkey and provided consultancy to increase the efficiency of NGO activities. He has been also affiliated with the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies as an Adjunct Professor. Email: cuneytgurer@gmail.com Twitter: @cuneytgurer

Sarah Hughes

Sarah M. Hughes is an ESRC postdoctoral research fellow within Durham University’s Geography Department. Her current research focuses upon on conceptualisations of resistance within the UK asylum system. In addition to this research, she has pursued her interest in questions around resistance, knowledge production and what constitutes ‘the political’ through collaborative work on other projects (e.g. exploring the politics of memory at the ten-year anniversary of the London bombings and an ongoing interdisciplinary project focusing upon Chelsea Manning and the politics of knowledge curation). Email: s.m.hughes@durham.ac.uk Twitter: sarah_hughes90

Jo Hynes

Jo Hynes is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, exploring the legal geographies of EU and UK immigration law. Using ethnographies of tribunal hearings and interviews with their key actors, she will examine the impact of space and technology on access to justice in immigration bail hearings. During her geography undergraduate at the University of Oxford (2015), Jo became interested in issues of immigration detention and was involved in student activism around Campsfield Immigration Removal Centre, in particular resisting it’s proposed expansion. After a year completing a social impact graduate scheme and working for Quakers in Britain on issues of peace and social justice, Jo went back to academia to study for an MSc in Global Migration at University College London (2017). Here she paired her experience of doing long-term ethnographies with her interests in the process of immigration law, to complete a dissertation exploring varying success rates in immigration bail hearings across three UK hearing centres. The key findings of this formed the basis for a Bail Observation Project report, which Jo looks forward to developing in this PhD research. Email: jh1076@exeter.ac.uk

Martin Joormann

Martin Joormann has submitted and defended the manuscript of his Doctoral Thesis (to be published with Lund University Press) in Sociology of Law. For this research, he focuses on asylum cases decided at Sweden’s migration courts. More precisely, the study analyses how the highest legal instance, the Migration Court of Appeal (MCA), legitimizes decisions that concern asylum seekers. After conducting ten interviews with judges at Sweden’s four (second-instance) Migration Courts as well as at the (third-instance) MCA, Martin reviewed more than 200 precedents (published 2006-2016). Following Robert Stake’s approach to what he calls collective case studies, the interviews are used to sample six precedents, which are then analysed in line with Norman Fairclough’s research agenda of critical discourse analysis. With the analysis of these last-instance decisions, it is exemplified how precedents of Swedish asylum law discursively represent 1) families with children, 2) class, ethnicity and religion, gender and sexuality, and 3) the policy of ‘regulated immigration’. Besides this research on asylum determination within the Swedish migration bureaucracy, Martin is currently co-editing (with Dalia Abdelhady and Nina Gren) a book on refugee migration to Northern Europe, preliminary title “Refugees Encountering Northern European Welfare States – The Construction of Crisis and the Bureaucratization of Everyday Life”. Email: martin.joormann@soclaw.lu.se

Carolina Kobelinsky

Carolina Kobelinsky is a Research Fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative (LESC), Nanterre (France). Her current interests focus on asylum policies and its effects on ordinary life; asylum adjudication process; and deaths at the EU borders. Recent publications include: La mort aux frontières de l’Europe: retrouver, identifier, commémorer, by Collectif Babels, Ed. le passager clandestin, 2017; Trapped to the local: The effects of immigration detention in France (with S. Le Courant), In Furman R. D. Epps & G. Lamphear (eds.) Detaining the Immigrant Other: Global and Transnational Issues, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 129-139; Judging Intimacies at the French Court of Asylum, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 38-2, 2015, pp. 338- 355. Email: carolina.kobelinsky@cnrs.fr

Alice Lacchei

Alice Lacchei is a PhD candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. She was a honour student in Political Science at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa), where she collaborated with the research team DREAM (Data, REsearch and Analysis on Migration). In 2019 she earned a Masters degree in International Studies (curriculum Governance of Migration) from the University of Pisa. In her PhD project she investigates how due to their different organizational arrangements discretion influences asylum adjudications in lower courts, focusing on Italy and France,. Using ethnographic methods, she studies judges dealing with asylum adjudications though the lens of the street-level bureaucracy. She especially focuses on practices adopted by judges as well as practices developed by courts, in order to consider the individual and collective dimension of discretion, as well as the relation between these dimensions. Email: alice.lacchei2@unibo.it

Amandine Le Bellec

Amandine Le Bellec is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Trento and Sciences Po Paris (France-Italy joint international supervision). She is interested in gender and sexuality issues in migration; and her thesis analyzes how the politicization of gender and migration has contributed to the reorientation of the EU Common European Asylum System (CEAS) to include LGBT+ identities as a valid category for asylum. Amandine holds an MA in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action from Sciences Po Paris, where she specialized in migration studies and published both on environmental migration, and on LGBT+ issues in French asylum law. During her BA in social sciences at Sciences Po Paris, she specialized for one year in gender studies at the University of Sydney, where she was awarded a High Distinction. Since 2016, she has served as a board member in several French human rights civil society organizations. Email: amandine.lebellec@unitn.it

Sara Lembrechts

Sara Lembrechts is a PhD researcher at the Migration Law Research Group at Ghent University. She studies children’s rights in appellate asylum proceedings in Belgium, using a multidisciplinary approach of legal ethnography. Her research is supervised by Prof. Dr. Ellen Desmet and embedded in the interfaculty Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR) and the Human Rights Centre (HRC). Sara has a Master’s in Children’s Rights and Childhood Studies (Berlin, 2013), an LLM in International Laws (Maastricht, 2011) and a Bachelor in European Studies (Maastricht, 2009). Before starting her PhD, she worked as a researcher and policy advisor for the Children’s Rights Knowledge Centre (KeKi, 2012-2020). In addition, she was involved in several research projects about children’s rights and child abduction (University of Antwerp, 2016-2020). Email: sara.lembrechts@ugent.be

Tone Maia Liodden

Tone Maia Liodden has completed a PhD in sociology on asylum decision-making in Norway. In the thesis, she explores how decision-makers in asylum cases reach a sense of conviction about the outcome in a context of uncertainty, and how organizational and institutional factors affect the experience of discretion, responsibility and doubt. The data material consists of interviews with asylum caseworkers, review of casefiles and observations of cases in court. The thesis contributes by demonstrating how local practices may give rise to different understandings of who a refugee is, thereby contributing to explaining disparities in recognition rates for similar claims; and second, by arguing for the centrality of doubt in the exercise of discretion. The findings illustrate the importance of the institutional and bureaucratic context for understanding how “the refugee” comes into being. E-mail: tone.liodden@afi.hioa.no

Annika Lindberg

Annika Lindberg is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Bern, and currently visiting scholar at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the street-level enforcement of deportation processes via an ethnography of migration detention and deportation centres in Denmark and Sweden. Her research interests include migration and border enforcement, political ethnography, carceral geographies, and law and society. She is co-author of the collaborative ethnography of migration control practices in the Schengen Area (together with Lisa Marie Borrelli, Tobias Eule, and Anna Wyss, University of Bern), entitled ‘Migrants Before the Law: Contested migration control in Europe’, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. Email: annika.lindberg@soz.unibe.ch

Emma Marshall

Emma Marshall completed her PhD at the University of Exeter and is a Research Fellow at the Public Law Project, which is a national legal charity that promotes access to justice for disadvantaged and marginalised groups. Her current research interests focus on the availability of immigration advice, access to legal aid in the UK, the responsibility of the state and the politics of justice. She uses ethnography to combine an interdisciplinary background of law, politics and human geography with activism and community-based research. She has also recently helped to set up a legal clinic in the Law School at University of Exeter to assist members of the public with ‘exceptional case funding’ applications for legal aid. Her PhD research is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and supported by the South West Doctoral Training Partnership and Doctoral College at the University of Exeter. Email: egm203@exeter.ac.uk

Alex Powell

Alex Powell is a PhD Candidate and graduate teaching fellow at City Law school. Alex’s research focuses on the interaction of law and culture. His thesis looks at lived experiences of identity among sexual and gender minority asylum seekers and uses these experiences as a way of assessing the suitability of the UK’s current refugee determination practices for offering protection to sexual and gender minority asylum seekers. Alex’s other research interests focus on the interaction of law and culture, with a particular focus on the role cultural products, such as film, play in shaping the epistemologies underlying law reform efforts. Email: Alexander.Powell@city.ac.uk

Emanuela Roman

Emanuela Roman is a researcher at FIERI (Forum of International and European Research on Immigration, Torino, Italy) and research associate at the Human Rights and Migration Law Clinic, International University College of Turin. She completed her PhD in Human Rights at the University of Palermo, Law Department in 2017. She holds an MA in Human Rights with Hons from the University of Padova, Faculty of Political Sciences (2010) and an LLM in Comparative Law, Economics and Finance from the International University College of Turin (2012). At FIERI, she is currently involved in three Horizon2020 projects (MEDRESET, CEASEVAL and TRAFIG). Her main research interests are the external dimension of the EU migration and asylum policy; migration governance in the Mediterranean; the externalisation and informalisation of EU migration; asylum and border management policies and its impact on the human rights of (forced) migrants; and the reception and integration of protection seekers and refugees in Italy. Email: emanuela.roman@fieri.it

Laura Scheinert

Laura Scheinert is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter. Her project looks to investigate the training of judges who work in refugee status determination. Before joining the University of Exeter in September 2018, Laura worked as an evaluator at the German Institute for Development Evaluation in Bonn, Germany, as part of the team evaluating the German development volunteer service ‘weltwaerts’ (evaluation report). Laura graduated in sociology from the University of Mannheim (Germany) in 2014 and subsequently successfully completed a Master’s programme in Sociology and Social Research at Newcastle University (2014-2015). Her MA thesis examined definitions of the ‘refugee’ based on the case of Germany’s so-called Temporary Humanitarian Admission Programmes (THAP) for Syrian refugees set up between 2013 and 2015. Two publications developed out of this work (with movements and the German Bundeszentrale fuer politische Bildung). All through her BA and MA studies as well as her work experience, Laura has developed and sustained an interest in issues around migration, asylum, citizenship and integration, looking in particular at the ways in which legal provisions play out in practice. Email: ls685@exeter.ac.uk

Stephanie Schneider

Stephanie Schneider is a PhD Researcher at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Siegen, Germany. Her PhD project is an empirical investigation of frontline asylum administrative practices in Germany and the contestations around ‘good work’. Stephanie’s research interests lie at the intersection of political sociology, sociology of law and administration, and of space and borders. Recent publications include Official Standards and Local Knowledge in Asylum Procedures (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 2017, with Karin Schittenhelm) and „Ohne ‘ne ordentliche Anhörung kann ich keine ordentliche Entscheidung machen …“ (in Lahusen und Schneider (ed.) 2017, with Kristina Wottrich). Email: schneider@soziologie.uni-siegen.de

Ilona Silvola

Ilona Silvola is a doctoral student in systematic theology at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Her research combines systematic theology with forced migration studies. In her doctoral dissertation, she examines conversion to Christianity concentrating on people who come to Finland from Islamic countries as asylum seekers and convert during their asylum process. In the asylum process, the state authorities assess the credibility of the conversion. In her dissertation, Silvola deals with this aspect of the phenomenon. Her research approach is qualitative with a special interest in theological and ethical questions. Silvola’s research profile and her latest publications can be found at: https://research.abo.fi/en/persons/ilona-silvola. Email: ilona.silvola@abo.fi

Barbara Sorgoni

Barbara Sorgoni is Associate Professor in Cultural anthropology and the Anthropology of Migrations at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society (University of Turin, Italy). Her current interests focus on the anthropology of different forms of asylum seekers’ reception policies and practices, and the role and use of narratives in refugee status determination procedure in Italy. Recent publications include: “Practices of Reception and Integration of Urban Refugees: the Case of Ravenna, Italy”, in K. Koizumi, G. Hoffstaedter (eds), 2015, Urban Refugees. Challenges in Protection, Services and Policy, Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics: Abington & New York, pp. 116-135; “Anthropology and Asylum Procedures and Policies in Italy” in E. Tauber, D. Zinn (eds), 2015, The Public Value of Anthropology: Engaging Critical Social Issues through Ethnography, Bozen: bu,press, pp. 31-60; “Chiedere asilo. Racconti, traduzioni, trascrizioni”, in B. Pinelli (ed.), 2013, “Migrazioni e Asilo Politico”, Antropologia, special issue, 13(15), pp. 131-151. Email: barbara.sorgoni@unito.it

Massimiliano Spotti

Massimiliano Spotti is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Tilburg University (Netherlands). Dr. Spotti’s expertise includes the implication of the internet for asylum seeking practices, e-citizenship, e-inclusion/exclusion, as well as discourses of morality and national belonging. He is also deputy director of Babylon – The Centre for the Study of Superdiversity at Tilburg University, where he works on institutional responses to super-diversity in urban and non-urban spaces across Europe. Email: m.spotti@tilburguniversity.edu

Stacy Topouzova

Stacy Topouzova is a legal researcher who has worked with forcibly displaced people in Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria since 2012. During this time, she carried out research for the Refugee Studies Centre, the International Migration Institute, the Oxford Pro Bono Publico, and the Bonavero Institute for Human Rights at the University of Oxford. Stacy currently supports the Global Network for Public Interest Law and is a Research Affiliate at the Refugee Law Initiative at the University of London. She previously completed research for the UN Special Rapporteur on Forced Displacement, UNICEF Canada, Terre des Hommes, Save the Children, the UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti, the Alliance for the Protection of Children in Humanitarian Action, the International Centre for Migration Policy Development, and the Centre for International Peace and Security Studies. Stacy recently submitted her doctoral thesis at the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford and she holds an MSc from the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. Email: stacy.topouzova@law.ox.ac.uk / stacytopouzova@gmail.com

Zachary Whyte

Zachary Whyte is Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS) / SAXO-Institute at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He works with asylum seekers and refugees in Denmark and Europe. He is interested in the intersections of transnationality, state practices, uncertainty and everyday life. He wrote his DPhil (University of Oxford) drawing on a year’s ethnographic fieldwork at a Danish asylum centre, and completed a post.doc. (University of Copenhagen) examining refugees’ experiences at Danish language schools. He has since pursued numerous academic and advisory projects working with asylum seekers and refugees, local communities, as well as state, municipal, private and civil society actors. Email: whyte@hum.ku.dk

*All details correct at the time of publication (2018-2021).