Refuge in a Moving World: People
The ‘Refuge in a Moving World’ network, hosted by UCL Geography, brings together experts from across the UCL who work on displacement, forced migration, exile and conflict.
The Refuge in a Moving World network brings together a diverse community of researchers, practitioners, and activists from across UCL who work on issues of displacement, forced migration, and exile. This page profiles the people involved in the network—highlighting their expertise, current research, and collaborative projects that deepen understanding of the social, political, cultural, and environmental dimensions of displacement worldwide.
- Dr Mai Abu Moghli
Dr Moghli is a UCL Active Citizenship strand manager and a British Palestinian human rights activist, practitioner and academic based in London. Mai holds a PhD from the UCL Institute of Education. Her PhD research focus was on human rights education in Palestinian Authority schools in the Occupied West Bank. Mai holds a Master's degree in human rights from the University of Essex and has worked extensively in the fields of human rights and education in the MENA region. She is a policy member of the Palestinian policy network (Al-Shabaka) and an associate member of the SOAS Centre for Palestine Studies. Her current research focus is on violence in all-boys Palestinian Authority Schools, refugee education and the formation of identity in refugee situations. You can follow her at
Email: mai.moghli.14@ucl.ac.uk
Twitter: @maimoghli - Bayes Ahmed
Dr Ahmed is a lecturer in the UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction. His research focuses on 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 help improve the living standards of forced migrants and the stateless population.
Email: bayes.ahmed@ucl.ac.uk - Dr Rob Aldridge
Dr Aldridge is an NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer at the UCL Institute of Health Informatics. Rob’s current research focuses on infectious disease epidemiology and the health inequalities faced by vulnerable, and often invisible populations, including migrants and refugees. Rob’s unique training in engineering, medicine and epidemiology allows him to carry out research using a range of methods, including mathematical modelling of infectious disease, and observational, interventional and cost-effectiveness studies. He is a member of the UCL–Lancet Commission on Migration and Health.
Email: r.aldridge@ucl.ac.uk - Raphaëla Armbruster
Raphaëla is the Coordinator of Admissions for UCL's international foundation course at the pre-undergraduate level, the Undergraduate Preparatory Certificate (UPC). She has also planned the Bowman Scholarship, which offers two students from forced migration backgrounds a full fee waiver for the UPC, on either the Sciences and Engineering or the Humanities and Social Sciences pathway. Following completion of the UPC, students have a qualification accepted by all UK universities, Russell Group included. Since 2016, she has been involved in the Refuge in a Moving World Education Sub-Committee, and in a number of projects at UCL (Pathways to Education for Women Refugees and Migrants, LCN Science and English Summer School). She also works as an educational mentor for the Refuge Support Network.
Email: r.armbruster@ucl.ac.uk / clie-bowmanscholarship@ucl.ac.uk - Dr Giovanna Astolfo
Dr Astolfo is a Teaching Fellow at the UCL-Development Planning Unit. Her research focuses on informal urbanism, and bordering practices in the urban context. She is currently part of an interdisciplinary DPU research project on 'Refugee Cities. The actual space of migration'. Further research interests are related to the ethics of design, especially the social role of architects and the legacy of the community architecture movement.
Email: giovanna.astolfo.13@ucl.ac.uk
- Tom Bailey
Tom is the Leverhulme Artist in Residence at UCL-Geography/Migration Research Unit. Tom is a theatre-maker and director. Creating work through his company, The Mechanical Animal Corporation, he has developed work across the UK, and internationally in Egypt and Finland. He read English at UCL (2007). In 2016, he was making theatre with refugees in the Good Chance theatre in the Calais 'Jungle'. During his residency with the Migration Research Unit, Tom will be researching and developing work that explores migration through live performance. - Professor Camillo Boano
Professor Boano is a Co-Director of the UCL Urban Lab at the UCL-Development Planning Unit. He is an architect and urbanist with interests in humanitarian urbanism, environmental forced migration, temporary shelters, post-disaster housing reconstruction, and communication in emergencies. He leads the DPU's new project, Refugee Cities: the Actual Spaces of Migration.
Email: c.boano@ucl.ac.uk
X: @CamilloBoano - Dr Beverley Butler
Dr Butler is a Reader in Cultural Heritage at UCL Institute of Archaeology. Her key interests include Critical Heritage perspectives, ‘Heritage Wellbeing’ and the transformative ‘efficacies of heritage’ particularly in contexts of marginalisation, displacement, conflict and extremes. Beverley has ongoing long-term fieldwork research in the Middle East – notably in Egypt, Palestine and Jordan. Her long-standing research collaboration with Dr Fatima Al-Nammari (Petra University Jordan) includes Dislocated Identities and ‘Non-places’ – Heritage, Place-making and Wellbeing in Refugee Camps (2011- ongoing). Beverley is Co-Investigator on a new joint ESRC/AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund research project with Professor Helen Chatterjee in collaboration with the Helen Bamber Centre which looks at the role of creative arts and cultural activities in improving health and wellbeing
Email: beverley.butler@ucl.ac.uk
- Dr Estella Carpi
Dr Carpi is a Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies at the UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and Humanitarian Affairs Advisor at Save the Children UK. She is a social anthropologist who is coordinating a new project, Refugee Self-Reliance and Humanitarian Action in Urban Markets, at UCL. Her research interests lie primarily in humanitarianism, refugee migration, welfare, and the politics of aid.
Mabisir website
X: @estycrp
Email: e.carpi@ucl.ac.uk - Dr Elaine Chase
Dr Chase is a Senior Lecturer in Education, Health Promotion and International Development in the Department of Education, Practice and Society at UCL-Institute of Education. Her research interests include the intersection between migration and wellbeing outcomes. Her current research investigates the outcomes for independent migrant and refugee children as they make the transition to ‘adulthood’.
Email: e.chase@ucl.ac.uk - Professor Helen Chatterjee
Professor Chatterjee is a Professor of Biology at UCL Biosciences and Head of Research and Teaching in UCL Culture. Her museological research investigates the value of cultural participation in health, wellbeing and education. She is PI on a number of projects including an ESRC/AHRC GCRF project entitled Co-developing a method for assessing the psychosocial impact of cultural interventions with displaced people: towards an integrated care framework, in collaboration with Dr Bev Butler, UCL Archaeology, Dr Fatima Al-Nammari at the University of Petra, the Helen Bamber Foundation and Talbieh Refugee Camp.
Email: h.chatterjee@ucl.ac.uk
X: @h_chatterjee - Dr Sarah Crafter
Dr Crafter was Senior Research Officer at the Thomas Coram Research Institute at UCL-IOE until joining the Open University. Sarah’s academic interests lie in the area of migration, diversity and the development of identities. By background, she is a cultural-developmental psychologist whose work is grounded in sociocultural theory, transitions, critical or contested ideas of ‘normative’ development and cultural identity development. She has a longstanding interest in working with child language who are children and young people who translate and interpret for family members after migration to a new country. Recently she has been working on research ('New families') that seeks to explore the care of children, by other children when they are unaccompanied refugee minors, including as PI of a new major research project led by Dr Rachel Rosen of the UCL-IOE.
Email: s.crafter@ucl.ac.uk
- Dr Jay Derrick
Dr Derrick worked for 30 years in Adult and Further Education as a teacher, manager and researcher before joining the Institute of Education in 2007 as a teacher educator. He led the Post-Compulsory PGCE programme for 5 years until 2017. He now teaches on the MA in Professional Education and Training, the MSc in Engineering and Education, the ReConnect HE Preparation Programme for Refugees, and for the Doctoral School. He completed his Ed D in January 2019, on Learning and Innovation through workplace practice.
Email: j.derrick@ucl.ac.uk
X: @JayDerrickIOE - Dr Delan Devakumar
Dr Devakumar is a Clinical Lecturer in the UCL Institute for Global Health. He is a medical doctor with experience in clinical paediatrics and public health. His research is on maternal and child health and is part of the Lancet Commission on Migration and Health.
Email: d.devakumar@ucl.ac.uk
- Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh
Professor Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is the Director of the Refuge in a Moving World network and is Co-Director of the Migration Research Unit at the Department of Geography. 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 Community Experiences of Displacement from Syria (funded by the AHRC-ESRC) and Analysing South-South Humanitarian Responses to Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey (funded by the European Research Council).
Email: e.fiddian-qasmiyeh@ucl.ac.uk
X: @RefugeeHosts / @RefugeMvingWrld
- Dr Adele Galipo
Dr Galipo is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the UCL-Institute of Education whose research interests include transnationalism, diasporas and migrants' return; urban diversity; development and humanitarian interventions; and nation-building processes. Her regional focus is the Horn of Africa, particularly the Somali region.
Email: a.galipo@ucl.ac.uk - Aydan Greatrick
Aydan is a Refugee Hosts Project Coordinator. He is responsible for the coordination of the MRU-based AHRC-ESRC funded Refugee Hosts project investigating Local Community Experiences of and Responses to Conflict-Induced Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. The project is led by Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh. Aydan's research interests focus on the intersections of gender, sexuality and religion in responses to and engagements with forced migrants.
Email: aydan.greatrick.15@ucl.ac.uk - Dr François Guesnet
Dr Guesnet is a Reader in Modern Jewish History in the UCL Department of Hebrew and Jewish History. Migration has been a prominent feature in Jewish history from its inception and forced migrations are part of this history of migrations. François works specifically on responses of Jewish communities to react - politically and socially - to such challenging situations in the early modern and modern periods (16-19th centuries).
Email: f.guesnet@ucl.ac.uk
X: @fguesnet
- Dr Cassidy Johnson
Dr Johnson is a Senior Lecturer at UCL-Development Planning Unit. She is an urbanist who is interested in migration and displacement in relation to urbanisation and urban life. Her core research focus is on disasters and post-disaster recovery, and this extends into looking at how people living through crisis situations make their way into the city, and how existing governance mechanisms can support them. Her current projects include Human, Economic, and Social Flows Beyond Crisis: Understanding the “Urbanitarian” (HESF), which is a DPU collaboration with Save the Children, UK; Reducing Relocation Risks and Urban Africa Risk Knowledge.
Email: cassidy.johnson@ucl.ac.uk
X: @cassidyajohnson - Sara Joiko
Sara is a PhD Candidate at UCL-Institute of Education. Her thesis aims to acknowledge the schooling experience of migrant families in the Chilean context. She has worked as a research assistant on education in different contexts (Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Chile and the National Institute of Education in Singapore). She also has extensive experience linking her academic interests (such as on education policy, family-school relationships and migration) with her community-volunteer work at different social organizations such as the Indoamerican Refugee and Migrant Organisation (IRMO, London) and Servicio Jesuita a Migrantes (SJM, Chile). She has been a member of the UCL Refuge in a Moving World Education Sub-committee since 2016 and she is currently supporting the UCL Grand Challenges funded project, Pathways to Education for Women Refugees and Migrants in London.
Email: sara.joiko.14@ucl.ac.uk
- Professor Ben Kaplan
Professor Kaplan is a Professor of Dutch History in the Department of History. He specialises in the history of relations between religious groups in early modern Europe – in essence, the history of religious toleration and conflict in Europe in the 16th-18th centuries. The history of early modern religious refugees is one important aspect of this topic.
Email: b.kaplan@ucl.ac.uk - Professor Ilan Kelman
Professor Kelman is a Professor of Disasters and Health at UCL 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.
E-mail: i.kelman@ucl.ac.uk
X: @IlanKelman - Dr Agnieszka Kubal
Dr Kubal is a Lecturer in Sociology at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Agnieszka is an interdisciplinary socio-legal, migration and human rights scholar with area studies interests in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. At UCL, Agnieszka has just 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.
Email: a.kubal@ucl.ac.uk
- Ruth Mandel
Ruth is Vice-Dean International in the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, and a Reader in the Department of Anthropology. She has researched migration issues for several decades, primarily among migrants from Turkey in Germany, as described in her prize-winning book, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish challenges to citizenship and belonging in Germany (Duke Univ. Press). At UCL she directed the series of international conferences and art workshops Engaging Refugee Narratives: Perspectives from Academia and the Arts in 2016-17, where talks, demonstrations and interactive workshops have brought together arts practitioners and academics who all are engaged in work with refugees.
Email: r.mandel@ucl.ac.uk - Dr Anna Marazuela Kim
Dr Kim was a Visiting Research Fellow at UCL’s Institute for Advanced Studies in 2017-18. She is an art and architectural historian with research interests in iconoclasm, particularly in the realm of religious images; art and terrorism; and the relation of the built environment to human thriving. Anna worked with refugees and immigrants in the US during the Central American conflict and more recently in refugee camps in Greece, as a photographer. She is keen to bring her activism around refugees into the academic realm.
Email: a.kim@ucl.ac.uk
X: @AnnaMarazuela - Ricardo Martén
Ricardo is a PhD Candidate and Researcher at the UCL-Development Planning Unit. His interests lie in the urban dynamics between informality, violence and migratory trends, as well as the role of urban design as a theoretical complement to the production of space. Current research projects look to examine these elements, particularly focusing on the urban legacy of official spaces of exception and the resulting informal counter-narratives.
Email: ricardo.caceres.09@ucl.ac.uk - Dr Richard Mole
Dr Mole is a Professor of Political Sociology at UCL-SSEES. Richard's research examines the experiences of LGBTQ asylum-seekers/refugees from Russia and other post-Soviet states. It examines the politicisation of non-normative sexual and gender identities in the former USSR, the different forms of persecution by the state and society in the post-Soviet space as well as the narratives LGBTQ asylum-seekers need to produce to make their claims understandable in the West.
Email: r.mole@ucl.ac.uk
- Dr Marta Niccolai
Dr Niccolai is a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Italian. Her research focuses on theatre events performed in war territories, primarily the Middle East, and in Europe, that explore human rights and refugees’ rights. She analyses the methodology applied and how the actor’s body and voice are used to encourage a deeper understanding between geographically and culturally different people who are brought closer by forced migration.
Email: marta.niccolai@ucl.ac.uk
- Dr Kristine Husøy Onarheim
Dr Onarheim is a medical doctor and a research fellow in health policy at the Institute for Global Health. She works on the SELMA project, which aims to study public policy responses to improve the sexual and reproductive health of migrants and refugees. In her PhD, Onarheim explored priority setting and intra-household resource allocation for newborn health in Ethiopia (University of Bergen, Norway). Her wide-ranging research on priority setting in global health includes work on women’s health, children’s health, universal health coverage, migrant health, access to medicines, and governance. She has been a visiting researcher at Harvard University. As a medical doctor, she has clinical experience in Norway, Ethiopia and India. Onarheim was a founding member of the Lancet Youth Commission on Essential Medicines Policies and an intern at the WHO.
Email: k.onarheim@ucl.ac.uk. - Dr Miriam Orcutt
Dr Orcutt is a medical doctor and academic researcher currently coordinating the UCL-Lancet Commission for Migration and Health; she is a Research Associate at UCL’s Institute of Global Health. Her background is in medical anthropology and her current research explores refugee health, including research with Syrian refugees in informal camps in Northern Greece. Email: m.orcutt@ucl.ac.uk
X: @miriamorcutt - Dr Amira Osman
Dr Osman is Research Fellow at the UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction (IRDR). Dr Osman's research interests include gender and forced migration, humanitarian intervention, conflict resolution and peacebuilding, gender analysis, and the use of evidence to inform policy-making.
Email: amira.osman@ucl.ac.uk
- Dr Tejendra Pherali
Dr Pherali is a Senior Lecturer in Education and International Development at UCL-Institute of Education. His research focuses on education in conflict-affected societies and the role of education in post-conflict peacebuilding. He is currently involved in research into educational challenges for Syrian refugee children in Lebanon and Jordan, and education for peace in Somaliland.
Email: t.pherali@ucl.ac.uk
- Dr Thibaut Raboin
Dr Raboin is a Teaching Fellow at the Department of French. He is the author of Discourses on LGBT asylum in the UK: constructing a queer haven, published by Manchester University Press (2016), and has authored articles on LGBT asylum and homonationalism. His interdisciplinary research is based on the critical discourse analysis of French and UK public discourses, in particular in relation to race, sexuality, gender and migration, and the emergence and configuration of social problems in public arenas. Alongside his work on the discourses of forced migration, his current research concerns the expression of social suffering on the radio, with an attention to listening as both a mode of governmentality and a critical act.
Email: thibaut.raboin.09@ucl.ac.uk - Dr Victoria Redclift
Dr Redclift is a Political Sociologist at the UCL IoE. Her research interests are in the Sociology of 'race', ethnicity and migration, particularly citizenship and political exclusion. She is the author of Statelessness and Citizenship: Camps and the creation of political space (Routledge, 2013), shortlisted for the BSA Phillip Abrams prize in 2014, and editor of New Racial Landscapes: Contemporary Britain and the neoliberal conjuncture (Routledge, 2015). She is currently the PI of a Phillip Leverhulme Prize project and an ESRC Future Research Leaders award. Her work pays particular attention to spatial formations of political exclusion, histories of displacement and the formation of diaspora, and the negotiation of local and global political subjectivity. She has worked at the LSE, the University of Manchester and the University of Surrey, and joined UCL in 2018. - Professor Rachel Rosen
Rachel is a Professor of Sociology with a focus on displacement and forced migration, unequal childhoods, and social reproduction. Her work explores stratification and bordering of the conditions in which life is made and made meaningful, and in turn how children and their families with precarious immigration status sustain, weather, evade, care, and engage in solidaristic action. She is co-author of Bordering Social Reproduction Migrant Mothers and Children Making Lives in the Shadows and co-editor of Crisis for whom? Critical global perspectives on childhood, care, and migration and Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes? Rachel is currently co-leading an ESRC project entitled Social reproduction in the shadows: Making lives with ‘no recourse to public funds’. Her previous projects have included Children Caring on the Move, which explored separated child migrants’ experiences of care, and caring for others, as they navigate the complexities of the immigration-welfare nexus in England, and Solidarities - exploring how solidarities are imagined and practised in negotiations of migrant deservingness.
Email: R.Rosen@ucl.ac.uk
- Dr Tatiana Thieme
Dr Thieme is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the UCL Department of Geography. Her research interests engage with different aspects of austerity and makeshift urbanism, focusing on alternative cultural and economic geographies related to the politics of urban poverty, informal work, and everyday strategies in contexts of precarious urban environments. Building on her recent ethnographic work in Nairobi’s informal settlements and ongoing work in London with offenders nearing the end of their prison sentence, Tatiana’s British Academy-funded project - Temporary migrants or new European citizens? Geographies of integration and response between ‘camps’ and the city - bring together her research interests in informality, labour limbo, and social navigation of uncertain urban life. More information about her new project is included below.
Email: t.thieme@ucl.ac.uk
- Dr Ralph Wilde
Dr Wilde (UCL-Laws) 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 appointments include being a Senior Research Associate at the Refugee Law Initiative of the Human Rights Consortium of the University of London School of Advanced Studies. He is a long-standing member of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM), having served as Rapporteur for one of the IASFM’s conferences. 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. His ongoing work on extraterritoriality is as PI of the project ‘human rights beyond borders’, funded by an ERC Starting Grant. More information, including publications, on Ralph, is available on his profile and on the human rights beyond borders project.
Email: ralph.wilde@ucl.ac.uk
X: @ralphwilde
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