Peggy Levitt

Wellesley College

Peggy Levitt is the Mildred Lane Kemper Chair of Sociology at Wellesley College and a co-founder of the Global (De)Centre. Her latest book, Transnational Social Protection: Social Welfare Across National Borders (co-authored with Erica Dobbs, Ken Sun, and Ruxandra Paul) was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Peggy co-directed the Transnational Studies Initiative and the Politics and Social Change Workshop at Harvard University from 1998-2020. She received Honorary Doctoral Degrees from the University of Helsinki (2017) and from Maastricht University (2014). She has held numerous fellowships and guest professorships including, most recently, at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy (2024); the University of Bologna (2024); The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna (2023); and at the University of Edinburgh (2023). Her earlier books include Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display (University of California Press 2015), Religion on the Edge (Oxford University Press 2012), God Needs No Passport (New Press 2007), The Transnational Studies Reader (Routledge 2007), The Changing Face of Home (Russell Sage 2002), and The Transnational Villagers (UC Press 2001).

Darshan Vigneswaran

University of Amsterdam

Darshan Vigneswaran is the Co-Director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies and Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam. He is also a Senior Editorial Fellow at the journal Migration Politics. His research aims to understand and explain deep changes in the structure of international politics and his work is primarily interested in how the state's claim to territory has been reconfigured in response to changing patterns of human mobility and settlement. He is the author of Territory, Migration and the Evolution of the International System (2013) and co-editor of Mobility Makes States: Migration and Power in Africa (2015). He currently is involved in two Swedish Research Council funded projects on the Externalization of Migration Control and Migrant Protection in South-East Asia.

Magdalena Lesińska

University of Warsaw

Amrita Pande

University of Cape Town (South Africa)

Amrita Pande is Professor at the department of Sociology at University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research lies at the intersection of globalization and the intimate, with a focus on reproductive mobility, repro-genetic justice, and mobile ethnography. Her most recent books include Epistemic Justice and the Postcolonial University (With Chaturvedi and Daya, Wits and NYU Press, 2023), Birth Controlled: Selective Reproduction and Neo Eugenics in India and South Africa (Manchester Univ Press, 2022), and Scripting defiance: Four Sociological Vignettes (With Ari Sitas, Sumangala Damodaran, Wiebke Keim, and Nicos Trimikliniotis, Tulika Books and Columbia University Press, 2022). Her award winning book Wombs in Labor: Transnational Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press 2014) has been made into a multimedia performance, Made in India: Notes from a Baby farm (Global Studies Production, Denmark), which she performs across the world.

Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye

Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France)

Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye is an anthropologist at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, conducting fieldwork Mali, Senegal and France. Her last book, An Address in Paris. Emplacement, Bureaucracy, and Belonging in West African Hostels (Columbia University Press, 2023), studies the ambiguities of a state-sponsored system of housing and the contentious role it has played for generations of migrants. Combining the topic of migration with her long-standing interest in popular culture and vernacular expressive forms, her current project examines how emigration is debated in the region of Kayes, Mali, through the study of a radio station and its sound archives.

Ranabir Samaddar

Calcutta Research Group

Ranabir Samaddar is the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies at the Calcutta Research Group and Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He belongs to the critical school of thinking and is considered as one of the foremost theorists in the field of migration and forced migration studies. His writings on migration, forms of labour, urbanisation, and political struggles have brought in a new turn in post-colonial thinking. Among his popular work are Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (2018), Migrants and the Neoliberal City (2018), The Postcolonial Age of Migration (2020), A Pandemic and the Politics of Life (2021), Imprints of the Populist Time (2022), Alternative Futures and the Present: Postcolonial Possibilities (2023), Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas( Co-edited, 2023).

Sara Prestianni

EuroMed Rights (Brussels)

Sara Prestianni is the Advocacy Director at EuroMed Rights, a network representing 68 organizations active in 30 countries on both shores of the Mediterranean, based in the Brussels office since March 2020. Since 2004, Sara Prestianni has focused her research and advocacy efforts on the Mediterranean and Sahel regions, particularly in the fields of migration and European Southern neighbourhood policies. She has contributed to several reports on human rights violations at the internal and external borders of the EU, as well as to the Atlas of Migrants in Europe, a critical geography of migration policies (Armand Colin 2009, 2012, 2021). She co-authored Je m’y suis réfugié là ! Bords de route en exil (Ed. Donner Lieu 2011) with Michel Agier and participated in the collective work Un monde de camps (Ed. La Découverte, 2014).

Harouna MOUNKAILA

Ecole Normale Supérieure Abdou Moumouni University of Niamey

Prof Mounkaila is head of the Study and Research Group, Migrations, Spaces and Societies (GERMES), co-leader and member of the collegiate management of the International Mixed Laboratory (LMI) Mobilities, Travel, Innovations and Dynamics in Mediterranean and Sub-Saharan Africa (MOVIDA). He is an associate researcher at the Migrations and Society Research Unit (URMIS) His current research focuses on migration policies and the reconfiguration of migratory routes and paths, female mobility, Nigerien communities settled in large cities in West Africa and the integration of migrants in urban areas.

Khatharya Um

University of California (Berkeley)

Khatharya Um is a political scientist, Associate Dean and ​Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, ​Berkeley, and Co-founder of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective.
Her research and teaching center on migration and critical refugee studies, and peace and conflict studies, with a focus on Asia and Asian diasporas. An internationally acclaimed scholar, her groundbreaking research illuminates the global impact of war, genocide, and forced migration. Her recent publications include Générations Postrefugiées: Les descendants des réfugiés d’Asie du Sud-Est en France. An impassioned community advocate, she is widely recognized for her engaged scholarship and intellectual leadership, including as recipient of the prestigious Fukuoka Academic Laureate prize. A refugee scholar, she is the first Cambodian woman to receive a Ph.D. in the US.

Chowra Makaremi

School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (Paris)

Chowra Makaremi is a CNRS tenured researcher in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. She has coordinated collective volumes on border control and detention in Europe (Enfermés dehors. Enquête sur le confinement des étrangers (Le Croquant, 2009) with C. Kobelinsky ; Entre accueil et rejet. Ce que les villes font aux migrants (Le passager clandestin, 2018) with V. Bontemps et S. Mazouz).
Since 2011, she has been working on the Iranian revolution of 1979, the genealogy of the Islamic Republic and the question of state violence, based on an ethnography of archives.

Ana Carolina de Moura Delfim Maciel

State University of Campinas (Brazil)

Ana Carolina de Moura Delfim Maciel is researcher and professor in Postgraduate Multimeios Departement at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP/BRAZIL). Trained in history, audiovisual and memory studies, she has been also working as a director of film documentaries.  She is currently the President of Refugee’s Chair “Sérgio Vieira de Mello” (UNICAMP/UNHCR), International Fellow at Institut Convergences Migrations (ICM) and former coordinator of research centers at COCEN/UNICAMP.  Completed post-doctorate at The University of São Paulo (USP), holds a BA in history from the UNICAMP (1994), an MA in multimedia from the UNICAMP (2000), a PhD in history from the UNICAMP (2008) with a doctorate in history and biography carried out at the EHESS (Paris, 2006).

Janine Dahinden

University of Neuchâtel

Janine Dahinen is a Professor of Transnational Studies and interested in understanding  (de)migraticization, mobility, transnationalisation and boundary making, and their concomitant production of inequalities that are related to ethnicity, race, class, and gender. As such her research contributes to three domains: Reflexivities and knowledge production in migration studies, the social organization of 'difference' and mobility studies.