The purpose and people behind this project

Women in Migration is a collaborative storytelling project about the journeys migrant women take, and what happens once they reach their destination. We have collected testimonies from more than 100 women worldwide to shed light on how gender affects migration, and to highlight the resilience of those who seek a new life far from home.

Our team

Floretta Boonzaier

Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Co-Director of the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa

Floretta is noted for her work in feminist, critical and postcolonial psychologies, subjectivity in relation to race, gender and sexuality, and gender-based violence, and qualitative research. She was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Psychology in Society (PINS) from 2018 to 2021. She is a past UCT Mandela Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and a past recipient of the runner up award in the South African Department of Science and Technology’s Women in Science awards, for the category of Distinguished Young Woman Researcher in the Social Sciences or Humanities.
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Elizabeth Brabec

Director of the Center for Heritage and Society

Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

Elizabeth is the editor of the Taylor & Francis journal, Heritage & Society, which focuses on the role of heritage in contemporary life. Her current research is focused on migration and the role of heritage in mitigating the trauma of human movement and displacement. A member of ICOMOS, she serves as the Secretary General of the ISCCL (International Scientific Committee on Cultural Landscapes) and a member of the ICOMOS Climate Change and Cultural Heritage Working Group.
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Megan Clement

Journalist and editor

Megan Clement is a journalist and editor specialising in gender, urbanism, human rights and social policy. She also writes about Paris, where she has lived since 2015. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Sydney Morning Herald, Al Jazeera, The New Humanitarian, The Australian Book Review and News Deeply, among other publications. She is the inaugural winner of the Island Magazine Nonfiction Prize. In 2018, she won an ILO media award for her editing of a piece investigating the conditions of migrant workers in Gulf states. In 2012, her work with Professor Sharon Pickering on asylum seeker policy in Australia won a Human Rights Award in the media category.
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Talitha Dubow

Researcher within the Migration Group at UNU-MERIT/Maastricht Graduate School of Governance

Talitha’s research focuses on the migration trajectories and decision-making of refugees and other migrants, and their reintegration experiences upon return. She has conducted migration projects for: the European Commission; UNCTAD, IOM, and UNHCR; GIZ; the WODC (Research and Documentation Centre of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security); and the Worldwide Universities Network. She is currently completing a PhD thesis on migration decision-making in the Western Balkans. Talitha obtained her MSc in Public Policy and Human Development from Maastricht University/UNU-MERIT, and her BA from the University of Cambridge.
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Farida Fozdar

Professor in Anthropology and Sociology at The University of Western Australia

Co-Founder of the Migration, Mobilities and Belonging research group

Farida’s research focuses on race relations and migrant settlement, racism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. She has published widely, particularly on refugee settlement in Australia, and issues of employment, identity and mental health. Her most recent projects are on postnationalism; and on the African diaspora and settlement in Australia, both refugee and non-refugee.
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Ivan Katsere

Doctoral candidate at the University of Cape Town

Ivan completed his Masters in research Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand. Ivan has always been passionate about research on migration and the intersections of migration, gender, and violence. His Masters research on ‘Zimbabwean children who serve as language brokers for their parents and friends in South African spaces’ was his first work in migration which he has now expanded into the current focus of his doctoral work on gender and migration. His key areas of focus are migration, violence and Afrophobia and he has contributed to national media conversations on these topics.
Website

Katie Kuschminder

Associate Professor at Maastricht University/UNU-MERIT

Academic Lead of this WUN project on Gendering Migration

Katie is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work explores the nexus of policies and migrants’ experiences. Currently she is starting a European Research Council (ERC)-funded project on Reintegration Governance. Her work has been published in several journals including Antipode, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Refugee Studies, and International Migration. From 2016 to 2018 she was a Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Rubicon Research Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.
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Ortrun Merkle

Postdoctoral Researcher working on corruption, gender and migration

Dr. Ortrun Merkle’s research in particular focuses on gendered forms of corruption, such as sextortion and the role of gender norms in the context of corruption. She is involved in research and teaching on gender, corruption, and migration both for policy makers and academia. She holds a Ph.D. from Maastricht University, a MA in Economics, a MA in International Relations and a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Security Studies from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, NY. Her PhD thesis focused on the relationship between gender and corruption.
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Linda Oucho

Executive Director of the African Migration and Development Policy Centre

Dr. Oucho holds a PhD in Ethnic Relations from the University of Warwick, where she specialised in international migration of African Women. Dr. Oucho has conducted research on internal regional migration patterns related to poverty, climate change, youth-employment-migration nexus as well as diaspora return migration and reintegration among others. She has undertaken consultancies with several international agencies including African Union, IOM, ICMPD, UNDP, GIZ and IDRC among others. Furthermore, she serves as an editorial board member for the International Migration Review (IMR) and is a Migration Research and Publishing High Level Advisor for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
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Marina de Regt

Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Marina specialises in gender and migration in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, with particular attention for Yemen and Ethiopia. She is the co-author of Adolescent Girls’ Migration in the Global South: Transitions into Adulthood (with Katarzyna Grabska and Nicoletta Del Franco) (Palgrave Macmillan 2019).
Website

Ann Singleton

Reader in Migration Policy at the University of Bristol

Strategic Policy Lead at the Migration Mobilities Bristol Specialist Research Institute

Ann’s expertise lies in the production of statistics and knowledge on migration. Her work focuses on national, regional and international efforts to improve the evidence base on migration. She aims to support work that both critically interrogates and bridges the gap between data, policy and academic worlds in the field of migration. Ann has published and spoken widely on asylum and international migration policy and statistics in academic and wider civil society fora.
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Su-lin Yu

Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature/Center for Gender and Women’s Studies at National Cheng kung University, Taiwan

Director of Research Center of Humanities and Social Sciences

Editor-in-chief of NCKU Press

Su-lin Yu is the author of Mapping Third Wave Feminism and has published numerous essays on third wave feminism, transnational feminism and American ethnic women writers. Her current research interests include third wave feminism, transnational feminism, gender studies and migration.
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Did you know?

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A special thank you for making this project possible.

This project is funded by the Worldwide Universities Network Research Development Fund.