Six new researchers have recently joined the PROTECT Consortium: Kudakwashe Vanyoro, Mike Farjam, Pascaline Chappart, Evgenia Iliadou, Nicholas Maple, and Nicolette Busuttil. While, Vanyoro, Chappart and Iliadou are contributing to the fieldwork of Work Package 4, Maple and Busuttil are involved in the legal research of Work Package 2. Farjam will join the social media research conducted in Work Package 7.
Kudakwashe Vanyoro
Kudakwashe Vanyoro is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the African Centre for Migration & Society at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. His doctoral research explored how temporal disruptions at international borders shape (im) mobile bodies’ experiences and modes of waiting by focusing on irregular Zimbabwean migrant men at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border who have arrived in South Africa but are restricted in moving further into the interior.
He has also been conducting research uptake work for ACMS since 2014. As part of this role, Vanyoro is responsible for stakeholder engagement in South Africa and is regularly called upon to brief decision-makers in government and civil society, including the creation of synthesis documents and other communication products to make evidence more accessible and applicable.
Vanyoro is involved in the fieldwork and research of Work Package 4, which is co-led by Wits colleague Jo Vearey.
Mike Farjam
Mike Farjam is a Researcher at the Centre for Language and Literature at Lund University in Sweden. He studied Artificial Intelligence (BA and MA) and Psychology (BA) and received his Doctoral degree in economics from the University of Jena (Germany) in 2016.
Before moving to Lund, he worked as a post-doc and senior lecturer at Linnaeus University (Sweden). As a Computation Social Scientist he uses methods such as online experiments, Big Data analysis and agent-based modelling to study behaviour of individuals in groups and patterns of social interaction. Thematically, most of his research is on environmental and political behaviour and the implementation of policy interventions to nudge such behaviour.
Farjam is involved in Work Package 7, which maps and analyzes prevailing discourses on refuge and migration circulating on social media and in the media. This work is co-led by Lund colleague, Anamaria Dutceac Segesten.
Pascaline Chappart
Pascaline Chappart holds a PhD in sociology and her research interests include deportation policies and practices, the impacts of externalization of border control and asylum. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher at IRD – Urmis (Paris Diderot University) working on the processes of bordering and the reconfiguration of contemporary migrations they produce in Niger and in Mexico. She is currently conducting investigations on European deportation charter flights within the framework of the project ‘Air Deportation’ coordinated by William Walters (Carleton University, Canada).
Chappart is affiliated with the Center for Women and Gender Research at the University of Bergen and works in close collaboration with Professor Christine M. Jacobsen, who is a WP4 co-leader. As part of WP4, she will participate in the mapping of the ground level actors that are involved in the reception of migrants and asylum seekers in Marseille (France). This ethnographic fieldwork scrutinizes the multifaceted concept of vulnerability through its various understandings and puts into question its effects on the practices of (non)assistance.
Evgenia Iliadou
Evgenia is a Research fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Surrey. She has studied Sociology (BA), Social Anthropology (MA) and Social Policy and Criminology (PhD). Her research is an interdisciplinary self-reflexive ethnography which critically examines the historical development of the 2015 refugee crisis and the continuum of the politics of closed borders and violence in time and space.
Her research was carried out on Lesvos and focuses on the human consequences of the EU border regime upon refugees’ lives and the lived experiences of social suffering and border violence. Since early 2000 she has worked as a social scientist for various International and Non-Governmental Organisations in detention centres and refugee camps on Lesvos and the Greek mainland. Her research interests focus on the continuum of institutional and structural violence, border violence and deaths, the refugee crisis, temporal violence, deterrence, and social suffering.
As part of PROTECT, Iliadou will contribute to the fieldwork of WP4 in Greece. Her colleagues from the University of Surrey also co-lead WP5.
Nicholas Maple
Nicholas was a PhD student at the Refugee Law Initiative (RLI), Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, under the supervision of Dr David Cantor. His PhD investigated reception policies in southern Africa and how they interact with the refugee regime and its core norms (with a particular focus on freedom of movement).
During his PhD, he was affiliated with the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand and the Southern African Institute for Policy and Research in Lusaka, Zambia. He taught on the core module (An Introduction to Refugee and Forced Migration Studies) on the MA in Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He has two years experience working in the field as an advocate for organizations such as Asylum Access, Norwegian Refugee Council, and UNHCR. Finally, he has previously completed consultancy work for the RLI and Chatham House and has had work published by UNHCR.
Maple contributes to Work Package 2, where he will explore the legal impacts of the Global Compacts on Migrants and Refugees on the right to international protection.
Nicolette Busuttil
Nicolette Busuttil is a PhD candidate in the Department of Law, Queen Mary University of London where she researches States’ obligations arising under EU law towards migrants with disabilities, particularly those with mental healthcare needs. Her doctoral thesis, ‘To Protect, Tolerate or Expel? Protection Obligations Towards Migrants with Mental Healthcare Needs Facing Removal’ explores a disability-sensitive interpretation of the non-refoulement obligation, by drawing on the contribution of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to the EU fundamental rights regime. Nicolette is also a Visiting Lecturer in International & European Refugee Law at the University of Westminster, a Senior Teaching Fellow in Law at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), and a Research Affiliate of the Refugee Law Initiative.
Busuttil is involved in PROTECT’s Work Package 2, which studies the legal impacts of the Global Compacts on Migrants and Refugees and is co-led by Elspeth Guild from the Queen Mary University of London.
Photo: Queen Mary University of London