By Liene Ulmane, Student Assistant at MIX – The Centre for Displacement, Migration and Integration
Photos: Private

Meet Rebecca Solovej

Rebecca Solovej focused her MSc degree in Anthropology on migration, trafficking, and gender. Since  February 2021, Rebecca is working as a teaching assistant at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, teaching courses on migration, gender, climate change, and global development.

“I am interested in the intersection between transnational migration, gender, and intimate labour and relations. I am particularly interested in how women’s everyday lives are shaped by global inequality, migration policy, and conflict,“ Rebecca says.

Meet Anne Sofie Børsch

Anne Sofie has a background in Sociology and dedicated much of her Masters to migration-related topics. “Currently I am a postdoc at the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen where I am affiliated with the Danish Research Centre for Migration, Ethnicity and Health. My recent Ph.D. research focused on the school lives of newly arrived migrant adolescents and how schools may act as nodes of social and emotional support for this diverse group of children and young people,“ she notes.

“My research until now has primarily focused on migrant children and young people's life transitions and care relationships in the context of resettlement. After becoming a mother two years ago, I have also grown increasingly interested in exploring how family and gender relations, including motherhood practices, are structured by migration experiences,” Anne Sofie continues.

Anne Sofie and Rebecca together with the MIX steering committee Chair Kathrine Vitus will work on project applications. Rebecca notes: “I am excited to join a research environment where people are passionate about migration research.” Anne Sofie adds: “I am looking forward to connecting with and learning from another research environment dedicated to critical issues around migration.”

Meet Franz Bernhardt

With an academic background in politics, Franz wrote his Ph.D. in Human Geography at Swansea University in Wales. “In my thesis, I examined how urban, regional, and national imaginaries of community in Wales effected narratives of hospitality for arriving refugees,” he notes.

“My academic work as a political geographer and migration studies scholar is quite interdisciplinary and placed on the intersection between political studies, human geography and critical migration studies- and thus concerns migration, displacement, integration, and how it intersects with social identity formation,” Franz continues. “For my PhD project, I volunteered and worked with the Swansea City of Sanctuary movement supporting refugees and asylum seekers, and I was honored to be able to present some of their great work as part of the Moving Cities Map for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Germany, which is an online platform showing a map of European municipalities that have actively supported solidarity-based migration policy.”

Franz talks about his journey to working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the “Enacting Citizenship and Solidarity: From Below” research project at Aalborg University. “An element I found specifically interesting in working on the Moving Cities Map was to learn about other local approaches in Europe that promoted the social participation and inclusion of refugees and migrants, and the ECS projects attempts to bring ideas and approaches to other towns and cities as well” he explains.

Franz will be working together with Professor Martin Bak Jørgensen and Professor Óscar García Agustín, on a postdoctoral project application on ‘new’ minorities between indigenous and migrant rights in Denmark and Greenland, and submissions to Carlsbergsfondet, in order to research some new questions as well. “Considering that my empirical PhD research was based in Wales and the UK, I became towards the end of the project really interested in how the strive for national independence in sub-state contexts affects these political movements attitudes towards asylum, and what potential political solidarities could perhaps emerge from this,” Franz continues. “I joined MIX to deepen my understanding of displacement and integration, but also to get support for developing a new research agenda which I started developing towards the end of my PhD, and which I would like to continue,” he concludes.