Biography

Before joining the EUI as a Max Weber Fellow, I was a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. There I worked on my PhD thesis, ‘Socialising with diversity’, which I successfully defended in August 2013. My PhD is in the interdisciplinary field of Migration Studies and was awarded by the University of Sussex.
My main research interest is focused on contemporary urban social configurations and how these are transformed through international migration. My PhD research is an empirical application of superdiversity. It investigates how multidimensional forms of migration related differentiations can be studied through the social networks of migrants from numerically small migrant groups. My work presents a novel perspective on migrant socialities in cities, and moves beyond seeing them primarily in ethnic terms. Through my PhD analysis I have developed a keen interest in the use of innovative visualisations to facilitate the analysis of complex data.
As a Max Weber Fellow, I extend the focus of my previous research to look in more detail at the complex configurations of the legal status migrants inhabit in different cities. The aim is to develop innovative methodologies for studying the social implications of legal status diversity and to allow for urban level comparative analyses of this intricate aspect differentiating migrants living in cities.
In my second year at the EUI, I will be co-ordinating a novel graduate level class titled ‘Reading the classics’, bringing together the expertise of different professors from the department of political and social sciences.
Fields of expertise: diversity studies, migration and urban diversification, personal social network analysis, data visualisations.