Consortium

Tallinn University is the leading partner of the MIRNet project.

Raivo Vetik

Raivo Vetik is a professor of comparative politics at Tallinn University. He earned his first PhD from Latvian Academy of Sciences in political philosophy (1989) and the second one in political science from Tampere University (1999). Raivo Vetik has been the Estonian coordinator in FP4, FP5 and FP6 projects devoted to migration and integration issues and grant holder in numerous research projects funded by the Estonian Research Council. Raivo is an individual member of the international network IMISCOE since 2008 when he contributed to the comparative research project TIES as a part of the network.

Mari-Liis Jakobson

Mari-Liis Jakobson is an associate professor of Political Sociology at Tallinn University. She has also served as a researcher at the Estonian national contact point of the Euorpean Migration Network (2016-2019) and as a visiting research fellow at the MacMillan Center, Yale University (2019-2020).
Her research foci are migrant transnationalism and politics (particularly transnational citizenship, migrant political participation in homeland politics and political parties engaging with voters abroad) and migration policies (labour and study migration in particular) and migration policymaking.

Leif Kalev

Leif Kalev is a professor of state and citizenship theory at Tallinn University. His research has mostly focused on citizenship as citizen status and agency, the state as a political community and the modes of its governance as well as the politics-policy nexus in the fields of citizenship, migration and integration.

In 2012-2015 Leif Kalev was also working at the Estonian Ministry of the Interior as deputy secretary general on public order and migration policy and as secretary general, having practical experience both on policies and organisation of policing, citizenship and migration policy, regional and local governance etc.

Marina Vahter

Marina Vahter is an early-career researcher and a PhD Student at Tallinn University.
Her research focuses on the role of morality in politics, as well as the conceptualisation of morality and moral conflicts in political theory and political philosophy.

Georg Sootla

Georg Sootla is a professor of public policy at Tallinn University since 1995 and senior researcher at the project “A relational approach to governing wicked problems” (since 2017), Estonian Research Council. His research focuses on institutional design in the public sector and on interactive policymaking, with special attention to the policy networks design and steering.

Tõnis Saarts

Tõnis Saarts is an associate professor of comparative Politics at Tallinn University. His research interests include political parties, party systems, electoral cleavages, and populism in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. He has recently published in East European Politics, Problems of Post‐Communism, and European Politics and Society. He has also authored several book chapters in the edited volumes and handbooks published by Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan

Katrina Koppel

Katrina Koppel is an early career researcher and PhD student at Tallinn University. Her research is mostly focused on the issue of populism and counterpublics, she did her MA (cum laude) thesis on that and continues the same topic on PhD level.

Nawal Shaharyar

Nawal Shaharyar is a PhD student and early career researcher. Her research examines the social construction of urban spaces and is focused on issues of ethno-linguistic segregation in urban residential contexts. She completed her MA (with Merit) in Development studies from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and where she specialized in urban development.

Russell King

Russell King is Professor of Geography at the University of Sussex, and Visiting Professor in Migration Studies at Malmö University where, during 2012–2013, he was the Willy Brandt Guest-Professor. At Sussex, he founded the Sussex Centre for Migration Research and was its director from 1997 to 2012. He was also the editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies from 2000 to 2013. For 40 years, he has been researching and publishing on migration in its various forms, and has carried out research projects on migration in many parts of the world, including Europe, West Africa and Latin America.

Michael Collyer

Michael Collyer is a Professor of Geography and member of the Department of International Development, in the School of Global Studies. At Sussex, he coordinates the ‘Geographies of Migration’ research cluster. He has several decades of experience conducting research into aspects of migration and development, particularly in the Euro-Mediterranean region, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. He is also a member of the UK Department for International Development’s (DFID) External Migration Advisory Committee.

Laura Morosanu

Laura Moroşanu is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sussex. She is also a member of the Sussex Centre for Migration Research and Associate Editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Laura has expertise in migration and ethnicity, with a focus on East European migrants’ everyday integration in the UK. Prior to joining Sussex in 2012, she completed a PhD in Sociology at the University of Bristol. Her doctoral thesis examined the social ties of young Romanian migrants in London, including a critical exploration of the role of ethnicity.

Gordon Harold

Gordon Harold holds the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Chair in Psychology and is a Professor of Child and Adolescent Mental Health in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex. He is also the inaugural Director of the Sussex Rudd Centre for Adoption Research and Practice. His primary research interests focus on the role of the family as a context for understanding children’s normal and abnormal psychological development (with a specific focus on mental health), the interplay between genetic and family relationship factors and children’s psychological development, the analysis of longitudinal data/working with cohort longitudinal data resources, and implementing practice and policy recommendations from research relating to early rearing influences (including trauma and maltreatment) on child and adolescent mental health.

Farid Miah

Having completed his PhD in Human Geography in early 2020 at the University of Sussex on the bilateral transnational visiting mobilities of migrants and non-migrants between the UK and Bangladesh, Farid is currently working as a Research Fellow on the Horizon 2020 Twinning for Excellence project titled ‘Migration and Integration Research and Networking (MIRNet)’. He has also taught undergraduate modules including Understanding Global Migration, Culture Across Space and Time, and Introductory Human Geographies of the Modern World as a School Tutor in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex..

Garbi Schmidt

Garbi Schmidt is a professor of Cultural Encounters at DCA, and was a Visiting Professor in Migration Studies at Malmö University in 2015, where she served as the Willy Brandt Guest- Professor. Her complete list of publications includes more than 130 books, academic journal articles, book chapters, academic book reviews, working papers, feature articles etc. Schmidt’s niche of research lies within migration studies, and includes both an anthropological and a historical focus.

Christian Groes

Christian Groes is an Associate Professor at Cultural Encounters/DCA. Groes’ research focuses on migration, social exchanges, gender, intimacy and transnational networks as well as processes of marginalization and belonging among migrants. Furthermore, Groes has specialized in ethnographic fieldwork, trust building and sensitive approaches to intimate matters of research.

Linda Lapina

Linda Lapina holds a PhD in Cultural Encounters from DCA and will work as a postdoc in MIRNet. Lapina’s interdisciplinary research focuses on urban diversity and draws on migration studies, cultural geography, cultural studies, critical race and whiteness theory, urban studies and gentrification research. As an ethnographer, Lapina incorporate embodied, sensory, affective and arts-based methodologies.

Pirkko Pitkänen

Pirkko Pitkänen is a Professor of Educational Policy and Multicultural Education at the Faculty of Education and the Research Director of TRANSIT. Her areas of expertise include transnational migration, cross-cultural work, multicultural training and multiple citizenship. Professor Pitkänen has published widely in national and international fields and has an extensive experience in leading and managing large-scale national and international research projects. These include e.g. the coordination of five EUs Framework Projects.

Inkeri Rissanen

Inkeri Rissanen is a Lecturer of Multicultural Education at the Faculty of Education and Vice- Manager of TRANSIT. Her areas of expertise include multicultural education, religious education and school pedagogy; most of her research focuses on the inclusion of Muslim immigrants in and through education. Her research has been published in key international journals.