Fiona Seiger
Producer
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 intellectual project centres on the politics of belonging in a world in flux, to which she now adds a burgeoning interest in urban spaces and in qualitative research involving ‘the digital’. Her education and research career have brought Fiona to Vienna, Paris, Kyoto, Tokyo, Manila, Singapore, and Antwerp, before she joined EUR in Rotterdam. 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 Migration Podcast.
https://www.eur.nl/en/people/fiona-katharina-seiger
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fiona-seiger-phd-4661a3136/
Jolynna Sinanan
Co-producer
Jolynna is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Manchester University. Previously she was Research Fellow in Digital Media and Ethnography at the University of Sydney. She holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and has an interdisciplinary background in anthropology and development. Her research focusses on digital media practices in relation to regionally comparative mobilities, family relationships, work and gender. Jolynna’s books include Social Media in Trinidad (UCL Press, 2017), Visualising Facebook (Miller and Sinanan, UCL Press, 2017), Webcam (Miller and Sinanan, Polity, 2014) and How the World Changed Social Media (Miller et. al. 2016, UCL Press). She is on the editorial board of Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration (Intellect Books).
Jamie Coates
Associate producer
Jamie is a Lecturer in East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield and holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Australian National University. He combines classical, visual and digital ethnographic methods with historical and textual analysis to explore the relationship between technology, mobility, identity and imagination in urban Northeast Asia. Jamie is currently investigating how media and migration change young Chinese people's perceptions of their place in the world, with a particular focus on migrants in Japan. His recent works include “The Cruel Optimism of Mobility: aspiration, belonging, and 'the good life' among transnational Chinese migrants in Tokyo” in positions: Asia Critique, “So Hot Right Now: reflections on virality and sociality from transnational digital China” in Digital Culture and Society, and the ethnographic film “Tokyo Pengyou” in the Journal of Anthropological Films at http://boap.uib.no/index.php/jaf/article/view/1538/1319
Milena Belloni
Associate producer
Milena is an ethnographer specialised in migration and refugee studies, currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Antwerp. She holds a PhD from the University of Trento. Before embarking on her fellowship, Milena was a team member of the ERC HOMInG Project at the University of Trento and a fellow in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome. In 2016 her thesis “Cosmologies of Destinations: roots and routes of Eritrean forced migration towards Europe” (University of Trento) won the Maria Baganha IMISCOE 2016 Award for the best doctoral dissertation in migration studies.Milena conducted extensive fieldwork in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Italy and the Netherlands. Her research mainly concerns refugees’ migration dynamics and integration pathways, transnational refugee families, migrant smuggling, and ethnographic methods. Milena's book on the migration of Eritreans to Europe, The Big Gamble, was published by the University of California Press (2019).
https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/milena-belloni/
https://unitn.academia.edu/MilenaBelloni
Amanda Paz Alencar
Associate Producer
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
Mamta Sachan Kumar
Associate Producer
Mamta is a PhD candidate at The Australian National University where she majors in Gender Studies at the School of Culture, History & Language. She received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. Mamta's PhD thesis gathers the stories of women across generations in Japan's Sindhi merchant diaspora, to appreciate the role(s) that they play(ed) historically as well as in the present day. Her interest in migration is linked inextricably to diaspora; within this frame of diasporic communities, Mamta keenly studies quotidian movements that inform the relationships between body and space, as well as metaphysical mobility such as through memory and projection. Her latest publication captures her ambivalent relationship with identity and belonging through poetry.
Sindhi Tapestry: Reflections on the Sindhi Identity - An Anthology
Alternative Engagements with 'Homeland': Sindh as an Expression of Diasporic Sindhi Identity
Asya Pisarevskaya
Associate Producer
Asya Pisarevskaya is an Assistant Professor in the group ‘Dynamics of Migration and Diversity Policies’ lead by Prof. dr. Peter Scholten. Currently she studies migration-related diversities and modes of governance in European cities within the project “Cities of Migration”. She is a lecturer and thesis supervisor in an international Master Programme "Governance of Migration and Diveristy". In the past she was a project manager of the international Horizon 2020-funded project “CrossMigration” which resuted in creation of a global online library of migration research www.migrationresearch.com. During this project she explored how migration studies have developed over time as a scientific field.
Her wider research interests lie in the realm of comparative migration and diversity studies, integration policies and labour market participation of refugees.
Dr. Pisarevskaya has obtained her PhD in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research at the University of Milan and the University of Turin (Italy). Her dissertation explored the role of policies in labour market integration of humanitarian migrants through a comparative study of seven European countries in the period of 1990-2008.
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 would also like to say "Thank you for the music!" to Johannes Vogel, the composer and producer of our jingle.