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The UCL Migration Research Unit is an interdisciplinary hub bringing together academics, researchers and experts from across UCL faculties working on migration; see links to members below.

Co-Directors of the MRU
NameDescription
Professor Johanna Waters

Department of Geography

Johanna is interested in researching the intersection of migration and education - particularly the mobilities of children, young people and households in search of educational opportunities. She is co-editor of the journal Migration and Society. 

Dr Caroline Oliver

UCL Institute of Education

Caroline is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCL, Institute of Education. Caroline’s research focuses on national and local government responses to migrants (resettled persons, asylum seekers and refugees, family migrants, and international retirement migrants). She is currently leading a Nuffield Foundation-funded project into experiences and outcomes of the Afghan resettlement schemes in England (2024-25). She has interests in city-led innovation in asylum-seeker reception in Europe, especially through leading a 3-year research and evaluation of the Utrecht Refugee Launchpad, which aimed to improve asylum-seeker reception through principles of co-education and co-living with local city residents. She also led a four-country comparative study of the rights and entitlements of Family Migrants in Europe. She is Chair of the International Editorial Board of the journal Evidence & Policy.

Dr Ben Page

UCL Department of Geography

Ben is a development geographer with specific research and teaching interests in the relationship between international migration and international development, particularly in relation to African home associations both in Africa and in the international diaspora.

Professor John Salt

Professor Emeritus in Geography, UCL Department of Geography: John specialises in international migration in Europe and the United Kingdom and his major fields of interest are highly skilled migration, and human smuggling and trafficking.

The late Professor Claire Dwyer, Professor of Human Geography was Co-Director of the MRU until 2019. Claire was a hugely influential scholar, who specialised in transnationalism and diaspora identities with a particular interest in faith and migration.

 

Department of Geography
NameDescription
Dr Charlotte Al-Khalili

Charlotte is a social anthropologist whose work explores the nexus between revolution, displacement and migration in Turkey and Europe. Her research focuses on Syrian revolutionary politics and subjects, religious imagination and migratory aspirations. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the CéSor EHESS and contributes to a project looking at the Syrian revolution, war and migration (SHAKK). Her current research project examines the notion of qadar (destiny) in the Syrian revolution and migratory trajectories. In her previous research, she mapped Syrian civil society’s answers to displacement in Turkey, tracing their origins to religious and political groups in the revolutionary and pre-revolutionary periods. 

Victoria Bauer

Victoria is responsible for producing the quantitative sections of the annual SOPEMI report. She also supports various statistical projects and publications as an analyst - data manipulation and visualization.

Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

Elena specialises in forced migration and conflict-induced displacement, with a particular thematic interest in gender, generation and religion, and a regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa. She is currently the PI of two major projects: Local Experiences of Displacement from Syria (AHRC-ESRC, 2016-2020) and Analysing South-South Humanitarian Responses to Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey (European Research Council, 2017-2022). She is also the Director of UCL's Refuge in a Moving World network and co-editor of the journal Migration and Society.

Professor Tariq Jazeel

Tariq is a Professor of Human Geography at the UCL Department of Geography. His research is situated at the intersections of cultural geography, postcolonial theory and South Asian Studies. He is interested in the politics of ethnicity and difference in Sri Lanka and the diasporic and transnational forms of South Asian Cultural production.

Professor Alan Latham

Alan is a Professor of Human Geography at the UCL Department of Geography. He is an urban geographer with an interest in how certain internationally mobile individuals and groups use globalisation – and the transportation and communication networks that sustain it – to create life projects that are strung across enormous distances.

Professor Paul Longley

Paul is a Professor of Geographic Information Science at the UCL Department of Geography, where he also directs the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre. He is a quantitative geographer with interests in inter-generational social and spatial mobility over inter-generational and generational time periods. He has also worked to create neighbourhood-scale geodemographic classifications and has undertaken family name analysis.

Dr Tatiana Thieme

Tatiana is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the UCL Department of Geography. Her research focuses on urban informality and precarity, particularly in East Africa. Her current projects include research in informal refugee settlements in Athens, Paris, Berlin and Budapest funded by the British Academy Camps2Cities.

Dr Tom Western

Tom is a Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at the UCL Department of Geography. His teaching and research centre on the movement of movements, following how activists travel, circulate, and migrate; how citizenship struggles shuttle from place to place; and how resistances resonate across relational geographies and radical trajectories. Tom works in Athens, where he is a member of the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum (SGYF), and a member of the ‘Memory-Monuments’ working group of Decolonize Hellas. With his colleagues in SGYF, Tom runs the Active Citizens Sound Archive – a space for amplifying citizenship work, community mobilising, and collective research and knowledge production.

UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analytics
NameDescription
Professor Adam Dennett

Adam is Professor of Urban Analytics at the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL where he is also currently Head of Department and previously led the MSc in Smart Cities and Urban Analytics. A geographer by training, Adam is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy and his own research has spanned a number of themes, touching on topics including population and migration, beer and brewing geographies, synthetic data, crowdsourcing and the built environment; and he has ongoing research interests in areas as diverse as gentrification and neighbourhood change, residential mobilities, urban health and inequalities, retail geographies and housing analysis. Tying all of these themes together are common methods such as spatial interaction models applied to novel datasets in urban settings.

UCL Department of Anthropology
NameDescription
Dr Alex Tasker

Alex is a development anthropologist and veterinarian, with a specialist research interest in human-animal-environment drivers of disease in marginalised populations. Before moving to UCL, Alex conducted research as part of the Oxford Refugee Studies Centre (RSC), Sussex Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), primarily focusing on mobile and migrant populations in sub-Saharan Africa. Alex’s current research explores how informal networks in forced migrant settlements can shape health outcomes, specifically considering informal and illegal agriculture. Alex’s most recent work ‘positioning zoonotic disease research in forced migration: A systematic literature review of theoretical frameworks and approaches’ is the first step in establishing the Refugee Agricultures Project, a multi-disciplinary group exploring the impact and influence of agriculture in forced migration settlements. 

UCL Department of History
Name Description
Dr Keren Weitzberg

Keren is a tech and migration researcher with 10+ years of experience in East Africa. She works at the intersection of science and technology studies, migration studies, and critical race studies, examining problematics related to mobility, digital identity, and biometrics. Her first book, We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya, was a finalist for the 2018 African Studies Association Book Prize. Her recent work has included a scoping project for Amnesty International called ‘Defending the Rights of Refugees and Migrants in the Digital Age’, a forthcoming moving-image work on the UK hostile environment with filmmaker Edwin Mingard, and projects on biometrics in the humanitarian sector and counterterrorism industry for Privacy International.

UCL Department of Political Science
NameDescription
Dr Anna Oltman

Anna is a Lecturer in Human Rights in the Department of Political Science. Her research interests are in displacement and international human rights and include topics related to refugee protection, migration and foreign policymaking, and the application of international refugee law in cases involving LGBTQ asylum seekers. She is currently researching the individualized Refugee Status Determination systems through which countries process claims to asylum, and the shortcomings of individualized asylum adjudication for providing protection to vulnerable migrant communities.

Dr Denny Pencheva

Denny is a political sociologist with a keen interest in the broader field of politics and international migration. She is interested in the political significance of migration and ethnic diversity and how identities, power relations and inequalities are discursively produced and sustained in political, policy and media discourses. Her research has focused on intra-EU mobility, as well as asylum migration, on migrants and national ethnic minorities (BAMEs, Roma people), often in comparative perspective. In terms of regional expertise, Denny's work has focused on the UK, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. Her book, with Dr Kostas Maronitis (Leeds Trinity), titled Robots and Immigrants: who is stealing jobs? (Bristol University Press, 2022) explores the pre- and post-Brexit relationship between the UK and the EU within the context of labour interdependencies, labour automation, and workers’ rights. 

UCL Faculty of the Built Environment
NameDescription
Dr Sarah Dowding

Sarah is an architectural historian at the Survey of London. Sarah takes a micro-historical and interdisciplinary approach to buildings in order to contribute to broader conversations about how cities change in the long term. At the Survey, she has recently worked on the experimental 'Histories of Whitechapel' project, which ​has deepened her concern for the ways in which trade and migration have shaped London's development and architecture over centuries. 

Professor Sir Alan Wilson

Sir Alan is the Director of Special Projects at The Alan Turing Institute (Chief Executive, October 2016 until September 2018). He was recently Executive Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute and Chair of the Home Office Science Advisory Council. In his research, as a mathematician and geographer, he works on the science of cities, building computer models that have applications in both planning and commercial sectors. He was a Professor of Urban and Regional Systems at CASA, UCL from 2007 – 2018, now an Honorary Professor. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds from 1991 to 2004 when he became Director-General for Higher Education in the then DfES. From 2007-2013 he was Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and from 2013-2015, of the Government Office for Science Foresight Project on The Future of Cities. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society. He was knighted in 2001 for services to higher education. He writes the Quaestio blog, which offers a range of essays on research challenges and material for his ‘Tricks of the Trade’ talks.

Professor Fulong Wu

Fulong is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London. His research interests include urban development in China and its social and sustainable challenges. On migration and migrants, he published extensively on migrant social integration in China. He is the author of Planning for Growth: Urban and Regional Planning in China (2015) and co-editor of Rural Migrants in Urban China (2013). He was an Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. He was awarded the 2013 Outstanding International Impact Prize by UK ESRC. He is the PI of ERC Advanced Grant ‘ChinaUrban’. He has previously taught at Cardiff University and the University of Southampton. 

Professor Haim Yacobi

Haim is a Professor of Development Planning at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL and the Programme Leader of the MSc Health in Urban Development. The main issues that stand at the centre of his research interest in relation to the urban space are social justice, the politics of mobility, migration and urban health, and colonial planning in Israel\Palestine. Haim's latest books are “Rethinking Israeli Space: Periphery and Identity” (Routledge 2011 with Erez Tzfadia) and “Israel\Africa: a genealogy of moral geography” (Routledge 2016). 

UCL Institute for Child Health
Name Description
Dr Kate Lewis

Kate has research interests in the social determinants of child health, including migration and poverty, and utilising routinely collected health datasets for epidemiological analyses. She currently works on an NIHR-funded project that uses linked administrative records to explore the association between parental migration history and child healthcare use in England. 

UCL Institute for Global Health
Name Description
Dr Delan Devakumar

Delan is an Associate Professor in Child and Adolescent Health and an honorary consultant in Public Health in the Global Health division of Public Health England. He is co-director of the UCL Centre for the Health of Women, Children and Adolescents. He was a commissioner and steering group member of the Lancet Commission on Migration and Health and is currently the lead for child and adolescent health in Lancet Migration. He is the lead for the upcoming Lancet series on racism and xenophobia and is chair and co-founder of Race & Health. 

Professor Therese Hesketh

Therese is Professor of Global Health at the Institute of Global Health at UCL. She conducts most of her research in China. She has a particular interest in the economic, social and health consequences of rural-urban migration in China, both for migrants and for those left behind in rural areas. Most recently she has led a large intervention project aiming to improve psychosocial outcomes in children left behind by migrant parents. 

UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction
Name Description
Dr Bayes Ahmed

Bayes's background includes research into the field of disaster risk reduction (DRR), conflict and migration, climate change adaptation, community vulnerability and resilience, and climate justice. He works in the intersection between conflict and disaster with a vision to improve the living standards of forced migrants and the stateless populations. Bayes teaches quantitative and qualitative research methods, application of geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing in disaster science, risk-sensitive land use planning, and landslides. He is passionate about working with grass-roots people to understand their disaster vulnerabilities and producing effective policy recommendations to address their problems. He dreams of a world full of peace, prosperity, and happiness. 

Dr Estella Carpi

Estella is a social anthropologist primarily focusing on social responses to crisis and crisis management, displacement and forced migrations in the Arab Levant. After studying Arabic in Damascus (Syria), she worked for several academic and research institutions in Egypt, Australia, Lebanon, Italy, and the United Arab Emirates.

Dr Jessica Field

Dr Jessica Field is an academic researcher with a background in history and humanitarian studies. Jessica's current research focuses on refugee protection and assistance in South Asia, particularly the Rohingya refugee crisis in India. Jessica regularly lectures at the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction, UCL, and is an Adjunct Associate Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University, India.  

Professor Ilan Kelman

Ilan is a Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England and a Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. His overall research interest is linking disasters and health, including the integration of climate change into disaster research and health research. That covers three main areas: (i) disaster diplomacy and health diplomacy; (ii) island sustainability involving safe and healthy communities in isolated locations; and (iii) risk education for health and disasters. 

UCL Institute of Child Health
NameDescription
Dr Pia Hardelid

Pia uses complex, linked administrative databases to inform maternal and child health policy, including examining the impact of international migration on the health of children. Pia is the PI on an NIHR-funded project that uses linked administrative records to explore the association between parental migration history and child healthcare use in England.

UCL Institute of Education
Name Description
Professor Elaine Chase

Elaine is Professor in Education, Wellbeing and Development at the UCL Institute of Education.  Her work explores the sociological dimensions of health, wellbeing and rights of individuals and communities most likely to experience marginalisation and exclusion. Current research includes wellbeing outcomes of unaccompanied migrant young people becoming ‘adults’ in the UK; educational wellbeing in contexts of mass displacement in Lebanon; the impact of deportations on migrant communities in Mexico, Guatemala and the USA; and the impact of COVID-19 on (i) access to legal care and support for unaccompanied children in the UK; and (ii) care and remittance practices among migrant communities in the UK.

Dr Alfonso Del Percio

Alfonso is an Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. His ethnographic research deals with language, migration, and labor, especially their articulation with capitalism and processes of social stratification, inequality, and oppression. Alfonso is a co-editor and founding member of the journal Language, Culture and Society. He also co-edits the ethnographic blog Disruptive Inequalities.

Dr Michela Franceschelli

Michela specialises in youth and young adulthood, life course transitions, social inequalities and migration. She is a mixed-method researcher with an interest in visual methods and particularly film documentaries. Her research about the effects of migration on local communities was disseminated via a film documentary – CCÀ SEMU: lives on Hold in Lampedusa  - and her latest work has looked at intra-EU mobilities and inequalities via a case study of Italian migrants in London.

Dr Eileen Kennedy

Eileen is a Principal Research Fellow at the UCL Knowledge Lab specialising in online and blended higher and professional education. Eileen researches the transformative potential of scaling up digital learning with the RELIEF Centre and the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). At the RELIEF Centre, her research is based in Lebanon and focuses on using innovative approaches, including collaborative MOOCs and digital education, to examine how best to improve the quality of life for all in the context of mass displacement. She is currently involved in the co-design of MOOCs to scale up community-based research skills, teacher professional development and community approaches to sustainable energy in Lebanon, MENA and globally.

Dr Meena Khatwa

Khatwa's research interests include BAME/migrant communities, gender, families and identity. She draws on qualitative research methods - particularly narrative and oral history - in addition to undertaking systematic reviews, on health issues with a specialism in qualitative synthesis and thematic analysis. Khatwa's thesis, 'Life Journeys: Narratives of Hindu Mothers & Daughters in British Homes' (2004), explored migration, home, identity and belonging. She was previously the seminar leader on the Migration and Society module in the BSc Social Sciences.  

Dr Amy North

Amy is an Associate Professor in Education and International Development at the Centre for Education and International Development (CEID) at UCL Institute of Education. Her research is concerned with understanding gendered and other inequalities in relation to education, particularly in low-income contexts. She has particular interests in literacy, women and girls’ education, and migration, with a focus on how ideas, policies or practices move and are understood between different local, national and global settings. She co-leads the CEID Education, migration and (im)mobility research stream with Professor Elaine Chase.

Professor John O'Regan

John is a Professor of Critical Applied Linguistics at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. John specializes in English as a global language, intercultural communication and critical discourse analysis, and has broad interests in political economy, critical social theory and colonial history. His latest book is Global English and Political Economy (2021) in the Routledge Language, Society and Political Economy series. 

Dr Miguel Pérez-Milans

Miguel is an Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at UCL Institute of Education, where he has taught since 2016. He has also been an Assistant Professor at The Faculty of Education in The University of Hong Kong (2012-2016). Miguel’s research has focused on language, political economy, ideology, migration, social interaction, and youth, across various institutional settings in Madrid, London, Hong Kong and Mainland China. He is co-editor of Language Policy (Springer) and Language, Culture and Society (Benjamins). He is also Co-President of the EDiSo Association for Studies in Discourse and Society.

Dr Victoria Redclift

Victoria is an Associate Professor of Political Sociology in the Social Research Institute at UCL, where she works on the sociology of ‘race’, ethnicity and migration, with a particular focus on citizenship and political exclusion. She is the author of Statelessness and citizenship: Camps and the creation of political space, which was shortlisted for the British Sociological Association Phillip Abrams Memorial Prize in 2014, as well as New Racial Landscapes: Contemporary Britain and the Neoliberal Conjuncture (with Malcolm James and Helen Kim). She won a Phillip Leverhulme Prize in 2014 and, along with an ESRC Future Leaders Grant for 2015, is currently conducting comparative research into experiences of citizenship in London, Birmingham and Los Angeles. She is also interested in racialized health inequalities and co-leads a UCL Health of the Public Grant on LGBTQ+ ethnic minority mental health and is Co-I on the NIHR-funded CICADA-ME study 'Coronavirus Intersectionalities - Chronic conditions and disability among minoritized ethnic groups'. 

Dr Rachel Rosen

Her research, teaching, and public engagement are located at the intersections of the sociology of childhood and materialist feminist thought, with a focus on unequal childhoods, social reproduction, and migration in neoliberal border regimes. Rachel's work explores stratification and bordering of the conditions in which life is made and made meaningful, and in turn how children and their families in precarious migranthood sustain, weather, evade, care, and engage in solidaristic action. Rachel seeks to critically intervene in debates about the politics of children and childhood and is particularly concerned with cultivating alternatives to child exceptionalism through attention to the disconnect between the symbolic figure of the deserving child and the experiences of marginalised children themselves. She is currently co-leading an ESRC project (Children Caring on the Move) and leading a BA/Leverhulme-funded project: Social reproduction in the shadows: migrant mothers and children with “no recourse to public funds”. She also is a team member on the Solidarities: Negotiating Migrant Deservingness project.

Professor Brad Blitz

Until June 2019, Brad was Director of the British Academy Programme on Tackling Slavery, Human Trafficking and Child Labour in Modern Business; Professor of International Politics at Middlesex University Business School and Visiting Professor in the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics. He is an applied social scientist who received his PhD in International Development and Education from Stanford University. He has published extensively on issues of governance, human rights, social policy, migration, political transition, labour, health and security. He has served as a consultant to several international and development agencies including DFID, the World Bank, Council of Europe, as well as several governments.

UCL Institute of Health Informatics
NameDescription
Rachel Burns

Rachel Burns is a Research Fellow in the Centre of Public Health Data Science at the UCL Institute of Health Informatics. Her current research focuses on understanding healthcare barriers for excluded populations such as migrants and refugees. She is currently the lead of the Million Migrant Study and the Right to Care project with the NGO Doctors of the World (DOTW) UK. Rachel is the chair of the DOTW UK Expert Consortium of Refugee and Migrant Health, advocacy officer for Lancet Migration and a Commissioner and part of the steering committee of the UCL-Lancet Commission on Migration and Health.

UCL Laws
NameDescription
Killian O'Brien

Killian joined the Faculty of Laws as DAAD Lecturer (Fachlektor) in September 2020, having been Assistant Professor and Director of the Law and German degree at the Law School of Trinity College Dublin. Killian has previously worked as a research associate within the German federal government as well as for the EU at the European Asylum Support Agency (EASO) on the harmonisation of judicial decision-making in the area of asylum law. Killian's main research interest is the international law of the sea. In particular, he is interested in the interface between law of the sea and both international environmental law as well as asylum and migration issues at sea. He has published on the issue of rescue at sea, pushbacks as well as the situation of seafarers.

Dr Ralph Wilde

Ralph is an expert in public international law, and also has an interest in the interface between international law and related academic disciplines, including international relations and legal and political theory. His research on migration has included work on UNHCR administration of camps housing refugees and IDPs, and the extraterritorial application of human rights and refugee law in the migration context, from sea rescues to the extraterritorial posting of border officials.

UCL School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies
Name Description
Dr Bojan Aleksov

Bojan is a historian working on a book about Jewish refugees in the Balkans, 1933-1945. The key point that emerges through my research challenges contemporary framings of displacement, noting that refugees did not flee from the “Global South” to the Rich North, but rather fled in the opposite direction. They were expelled from European capitals and saved by Balkan 'savages'.

Dr Agnieszka Kubal

Agnieszka is an interdisciplinary socio-legal, migration and human rights scholar with area studies interest in Central Eastern Europe and Russia. At UCL Agnieszka completed her second monograph Immigration and Refugee Law in Russia. Socio-Legal Perspectives (2019, Cambridge University Press). It results from her British Academy post-doctoral research fellowship project (2013-2016). Agnieszka's research among undocumented Syrian asylum seekers in Russia together with her involvement in their case before the European Court of Human Rights resulted in a court decision LM and Others v Russia (2016) and a real impact beyond academia: establishing standards of protection of Syrians against deportation in all European countries.

Professor Richard Mole

Richard is a Professor of Political Sociology at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. His migration-related research focuses on queer migration and asylum, migrant sexual health and sexual socialisation among migrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. In addition to producing scholarly research, he also regularly writes expert affidavits in support of LGBTQ asylum-seekers from Russia and other post-Soviet states. His most recent publication is the Open Access edited volume Queer Migration & Asylum in Europe (UCL Press 2021). Further information about the international conference on which the book is based can be found on the UCL European Institute website.

Professor Anne White

Anne is a Professor of Polish Studies and Social and Political Science at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. She is a specialist in Polish migration, as well as Central and East European migration more broadly. Her research spans sending and receiving societies and has a strong gender dimension. Her current project examines how Poland is transitioning to becoming a receiving country while maintaining a sending country identity.

UCL SELCS
NameDescription
Dr Helene Neveu-Kringelbach

Helene is an Associate Professor at UCL SELCS. She has research interests in transnational families, Francophone Africa and arts and migration particularly dance and music.

Dr Thibaut Raboin

Thibaut's research focuses on the study of public discourse about social suffering. He has worked on migration, sexuality and nationhood, with a book entitled Discourses on LGBT asylum in the UK (MUP: 2017), and articles on SOGI asylum. Thibaut has explored how Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) asylum is conceived in relation to questions of nationhood, human rights and forms of neoliberal optimism. He is currently working on the cultures of deindustrialisation in France. He examines how writers and artists have found the changing region of Lorraine a fertile ground for conflicting visions of work, migration, ruination and memory.

UCL Social Research Institute
NameDescription
Dr Rachel Benchekroun

, UCL Social Research Institute: Rachel is an Early Career Researcher and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow. She is a sociologist and ethnographer, researching the Hostile Environment, mothering and inequalities, taking a coproduction approach and using creative methods. Her postdoctoral fellowship builds on her PhD research into how government policy, insecure immigration statuses and the condition of 'no recourse to public funds' shape experiences of mothering, access to support and relational belonging. In 2022-23 she will be facilitating knowledge exchange workshops with mothers, frontline practitioners and campaigners with the aim of helping to shape policy and practice. She is also rewriting her thesis as a monograph.

Professor Mette Louise Berg

Mette is a Professor of Migration and Diaspora Studies at the Thomas Coram Research Unit within the Social Research Institute. She is the founding co-editor of the journal Migration and Society. Mette is interested in questions around the social production of difference, belonging, and inclusion, and in encounters between migrants and welfare services. Mette works ethnographically and has conducted fieldwork on urban regeneration in Havana, Cuba; on the politics of memory among the Cuban diaspora in Spain; on diversity and inequality in South London; and most recently on asylum dispersal housing in Yorkshire. She has extensive experience in working with local authorities and third-sector organisations. 

Dr Ashraf Hoque

Ashraf is a social anthropologist interested in migration and diaspora, the anthropology of Islam, and political anthropology. To date, he has conducted multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in England (Luton and Tower Hamlets) and Bangladesh (Sylhet). Ashraf has worked with British-born Muslim men of South Asian origin, exploring their everyday lives in relation to family and community dynamics, approaches to work and leisure, and being Muslim in post-7/7 Britain. His most recent research in Tower Hamlets and Sylhet focuses on transnational religious and political formations, which create distinct forms of ‘globalised’ democratic engagement.

Dr Humera Iqbal

Humera is an Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology at the UCL Social Research Institute. She studies family life and young people. Her work looks at migrant and minority family life and practices, citizenship rights and activism in minority groups, social identity and parenting across generations. Her work also explores the influence of culture, nature and the arts on well-being and belonging. Humera uses mixed methods, arts and film-based methods in her research.

Dr Andrea Verdasco

Andrea is a social anthropologist interested in migration, motherhood, and families in refugeehood. To date, she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Mozambique, Denmark, and England. Andrea has worked extensively with young and unaccompanied refugees exploring how they find a sense of belonging in a context of uncertainty and liminality. Her current work explores how refugee mothers experience everyday lives following family reunion and how they interact with the welfare state and advocacy actors.

MRU PhD Network

The MRU PhD network brings together postgraduate research students from across disciplines and UCL faculties. It provides PhD students with a forum for training, peer support, networking, knowledge exchange, reading and discussion. The network currently runs sessions on research training, writing skills and reading groups, where the aim is to learn from fellow PhD students at various stages of their research.

If you are interested in joining the MRU PhD network please email the network coordinator Jessie Sullivan: jessica.sullivan.21@ucl.ac.uk

Associate Members
Name Description
Professor Paul ComptonHonorary Research Fellow: Paul specialises in European demography and international migration in Hungary.
Dr Paul Densham

Reader in Geography: Paul specialises in Geographical Information Systems.

Professor John EadeJohn is a professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Roehampton University and Executive Director of CRONEM (Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism) at Surrey and Roehampton universities. John was a Visiting Professor at the MRU between 2010-2013.
Dr Pablo MateosFormerly Lecturer in Geography: Pablo focuses on investigating new ontologies and geographic visualisations of ethnicity, migration and mobility. His recent work has focused on residential segregation, categorisations of ethnicity, the geography of names, and the spatial analysis of populations and neighbourhoods in the UK, Spain, the US and Mexico.
Professor Peter Wood

Professor Emeritus in Geography: Peter specialises in the internationalisation of expert labour.

Dr Péter Berta

UCL School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies: Péter is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL (Politics & Sociology) and a senior researcher at the Institute for Ethnology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest). He is an economic and social anthropologist concentrating on Central and Eastern Europe, especially Romania and Hungary.

 

Join the MRU

To be included in our Directory of UCL researchers, please contact Professor Johanna Waters (johanna.waters@ucl.ac.uk) and/or direct message us on Twitter: @UCL_MRU.

Contact Us

General Enquiries 

Email: geog.office@ucl.ac.uk

Telephone: 020 7679 0500

Migration Research Unit
Department of Geography
University College London
North-West Wing
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT

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