Project members

Gaja Maestri (Principal Investigator) is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University, Birmingham (UK). Her research focuses on racial segregation and pro-migrant collective action, with a specific attention to social inequalities in urban contexts through qualitative methods. In the last ten years, she conducted extensive research in France, Italy and the UK on housing segregation of Roma people, the Refugees Welcome movement, and precarious migrant mothers.

TBC (Postdoctoral Research Associate)

To apply, please visit: https://jobs.aston.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?id=8758&forced=2

Karolina Benghellab is Lecturer in the School of Social & Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Her research is interdisciplinary in its nature, combining sociology, international relations, criminology, and human geography perspectives, and contributes mainly to critical migration, border, and security studies. She conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in makeshift camps and borders in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kurdish region in Turkey). Her research focuses on everyday violence for people on the move and how these diverse groups of people develop strategies of resistance. Her work combines security and violence theories with feminist and postcolonial literature to understand the racists and sexist logic of border security that draws upon colonial histories.

Jonathan Darling is Professor in Human Geography at Durham University. His research focuses on the spatial politics of asylum, sanctuary and solidarity movements, and the urban dynamics of forced migration. He is the author of Systems of Suffering: Dispersal and the Denial of Asylum (Pluto Press, 2022), which examines the politics of accommodation and support for asylum seekers in Britan. He is currently working on a book exploring the interplays between bordering, spectacle, and populism in contemporary Britain.   

Sarah Hughes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at Northumbria University. Sarah is a Political Geographer, working on asylum politics, resistance, citizenship and the politics of epistemology within the academy. Her work to date has coalesced around three main themes: geographies of resistance, geographies of forced migration, and geographies of knowledge production.

Claudio Minca is Full Professor in the Department of History and Cultures at the University of Bologna, Italy. He is a cultural geographer with a strong interest in social and political theory. His main research projects have focused on the relationship between spatial theory, biopolitics and modernity. I have also written extensively on philosopher Giorgio Agamben and camp political geographies. He is currently P.I. of an ERC Advanced Grant for the project: TheGAME: Counter-mapping informal refugee mobilities along the Balkan Route.

Vicki Squire is Professor of International Politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK. She has over twenty years of experience of research with mobile and displaced communities and is author of seven books and over fifty articles/book chapters. Vicki has undertaken research and led research projects across multiple sites and regions, including the UK, the Balkans, the Mediterranean, the Mexico-US border region and sub-Saharan Africa. She is currently Principal investigator of the Data Literacies in Displacement project (2024-2027) and has just published a new book, Making and Unmaking Global Citizenship (2025, Edinburgh University Press).