Our researchers
A presentation of our resarchers
Andrea Spehar
Telephone: +46 31-786 11 92
E-mail: andrea.spehar@pol.gu.se
Andrea Spehar is Principal Investigator of the research programme SIPGI. She is Associate Professor in political science and director of Centre on Global Migration (CGM) at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Andrea Spehar's broad research interest is comparative public policy, particularly with regards to gender policy and immigrant integration policy in a European context. She has spent a significant portion of her career studying migration in Sweden and in particular, immigrant integration. She is currently the PI for the research project “Refugee Migration and Cities: Social Institutions, Political Governance and Integration in Jordan, Turkey and Sweden” (SIPGI) (2019-2025) and the H2020 project “Housing for immigrants and community integration in Europe and beyond: Strategies, policies, dwellings, and governance” (MERGING) (2021-2023).
Kristen Kao
Telephone: (+)46 31-786 33 53 or (+)46 709-38 72 94
E-mail: kristen.kao@gu.se
Kristen Kao is a co-Principal Investigator for the SIPGI research environment. She is an Associate Professor (Docent) in Political Science and a former Senior Research Fellow with the Program on Governance and Local Development (GLD) in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. She holds a PhD and M.A. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 2006, she has been studying and conducting fieldwork in the Middle East across Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Lebanon, Tunisia, Oman and Egypt. She has served as an adviser or consultant to the Carter Center, the National Democratic Institute, and the World Bank, and is a Jordan country expert for the Freedom House and the Varieties of Democracy. In 2019, her research on reconciliation in Iraq won the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha award for the best paper presented at the American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting. Her research has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Swedish Research Council, Riksbankens Jubilieumsfond, the Social Science Research Council, and APSA, among others.
Josepha Ivanka (Joshka) Wessels
Josepha (Joshka) Wessels is a Senior Lecturer in Communication for Development at the School of Arts and Communication (K3), Faculty of Culture and Society. She teaches for the MA degree course on Communication for Development (ComDev) and is currently carrying out two Swedish Research Council-funded research projects on 1) Resilience in Urban Sudan and 2) Syrian Refugees in Jordan, Turkey and Sweden. She is in the final stages of an ethnographic film project, partly with support from the Swedish Crafoord Foundation, documenting life histories of Syrian refugees over a period of 20 years. In 2019, she published a landmark book on the history of Syrian Documentary cinema and video activism with IB Tauris/Bloomsbury UK.
Isabell Schierenbeck
Isabell Schierenbeck is Professor in Political Science at the School of Global Studies (SGS), University of Gothenburg. Schierenbeck’s main research interests are global public policy and administration, within the fields of international development cooperation and migration, as well as Middle Eastern politics. She has a long-lasting interest in research ethics and safety. Schierenbeck has published her work in Forum for Development Studies, Journal for Refugee Studies, Third World Quarterly, and with Routledge and Palgrave, amongst others. Her most recent publication is Safer Field Research in the Social Sciences. A Guide to Human and Digital in Hostile Environments (Grimm, J. et al. 2020, SAGE).
Mine Eder
Mine Eder is a Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. She received a Fulbright to pursue graduate degree at the University of Virginia where she received her MA and PhD in Politics. She also taught at Lewis and Clark College and was a visiting professor at Yale and George Washington University. She specialized on comparative political economy of development and published widely on various aspects of Turkey’s political economy ranging from regional cooperation, welfare provision, poverty and informality, problems of developmentalism, populism as well as Turkey-EU relations. Since 2006, her research interests shifted to include an exploration of interstices of migration and urban transformation in Istanbul; domestic female migrant workers, shuttle traders, displacement and gentrification in Istanbul's neighborhoods as well as local governance.
Tareq Naseef – Research Associate
Tareq holds a MA in International Politics from University West-Sweden and is currently pursuing a MA in International Administration and Global Governance at the University of Gothenburg. His main research interest is Middle East politics with a focus on Syria and the GCC, migration, governance, and peace and development studies. Tareq has previously been a researcher in Turkey and at Harmoon Center for Contemporary Studies in Qatar.
Tareq is currently working on three different research projects in Sweden. One of the research projects, supervised by Dr. Marco Nilsson (Jönköping University), examine the role of Muslim leadership and Muslim organizations amongst Muslims in Sweden, whilst a second research project explores the opinions of Syrian refugees in Turkey as regards seeking asylum in Europe. Tareq is collaborating with Dr. Wayne Coetzee, University West, on a third research project that explore the political economy of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Ezgi Irgil
Ezgi Irgil is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. Her research is broadly focused on the relationship between host community members, refugees, and local authorities at the city level. Within these relationships, she particularly focus on how did the use of urban public spaces by host community members change after the arrival of refugees, how do refugees develop livelihood strategies within these urban public spaces, their coping mechanisms, their agency, and reflections of this dynamic at the local authority level in re-shaping and re-framing the policy-making process. Prior to pursuing her PhD, she was working as a Research Assistant at the Migration Research Center at Koc University. She got my MA diploma in International Affairs from the George Washington University, Washington, DC, and BA diploma in Political Science from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey.
Ghadeer Hussein
Ghadeer is a researcher and development practitioner with interest in migration, governance, and post-conflict development. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a Postgraduate Degree in Cultural Development and Arts management from Cairo University. She has professional experience for five years in the NGO sector with refugees and asylum seekers in Egypt and Sweden.
She is a research intern with SIPGI project at Gothenburg university. Her research within SIPGI is focusing on migration policies at the city level in Irbid, through policies mapping and interviewing local bureaucrat and officials. Currently she is writing her master’s thesis at the Department of Political Science at Lund University. Her thesis is about refugee entrepreneurship and the global governance of the refuge regime with focus on livelihood and socio-economic integration in Jordan and Turkey.
Iman Abu Zueiter
Iman is an Associate Researcher with the SIPGI project. She holds an MA degree in International Administration and Global Governance from the University of Gothenburg with her thesis got the status of distinction. She also holds a BA degree in Human Rights from Malmö University.
Iman has a seven years’ experience working with several NGOs in Geneva (Switzerland) and Sweden focusing on the MENA region, human rights, refugees, and migration policies. She held different positions including researcher, field researcher, project coordinator, and a speaker and representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
At the University of Gothenburg, Iman also works with the “Retribution or Reconciliation? Attitudes Toward Islamic State Collaborators” research project, focusing on post-conflict Iraq.
