FIERI is an independent, no-profit institute. It is one the leading Italian research institutes on migration, mobility and integration. Since its foundation in 2001, it is strongly committed to a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the social and political transformations associated with growing population mobility and cultural diversity.
Although actively engaged in European and international networks (primarily as a founding member of the IMISCOE Research Network on “International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe”), FIERI is also deeply rooted in the Italian context, with a constant empirical focus on national and local developments and through proactive interaction with policy, media, and civil society. In the last few years FIERI has been involved in several projects on the legal, cultural and societal conditions of asylum seekers and refugees both at local, national and international levels.
Roles/tasks in the project
FIERI, thanks to its previous experience in the study of forced migration, transnational migration and integration of forced migrants, will give an important contribution to the theoretical and methodological part of the project (WP 1). Furthermore, it will contribute to the review of policy and legal structures in Europe (WP 3). FIERI will have a leading role in WP 6 devoted to the study of translocal figurations of displacement in Europe. FIERI will also contribute to identifying policies for PDS (WP 7). FIERI will participate in the dissemination of the results through various activities for policy makers, citizens and academics (WP 8).
Team members involved in the project
Ferruccio Pastore
Ferruccio Pastore , PhD (European University Institute, 1996), is Director of FIERI since May 2009. Previously, he was Deputy Director of the International Relations and European Studies think-tank CeSPI (Centre for International Policy Studies, Rome) and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Firenze. Besides research, he has worked as an adviser on migration policy issues for Italian institutions and international organisations. He has published extensively on migration and integration policies (full list of publications: www.fieri.it).
Milena Belloni
Milena Belloni is the principal investigator in the FWO (Flemish Research Foundation) project «Exiled and separated: a multi-sited ethnography of separated refugee families» jointly hosted by the University of Antwerp and the University of Gent. Her doctoral thesis "Cosmologies of destinations" won the IMISCOE award for the best doctoral thesis in Migration Studies in 2016. Her monograph, «The Big Gamble. The migration of Eritreans to Europe», published by the University of California Press in 2019, has received the honorable mentions of the RC31 Section of the International Sociological Association and the ENMISA section of the International Studies Association. Her work focuses on transnational migrant families, refugees’ journeys to and through Europe, migrant smuggling, refugees’ home-making in urban areas. She conducted fieldwork in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium. She has extensively published in the Journal of Refugee Studies, Global Networks, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.
Pietro Cingolani
Pietro Cingolani is a cultural anthropologist (PhD, Turin University) with expertise in multisited and ethnographic research methods in difficult contexts. He teaches Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bologna. In the last few years, he conducted research in informal settlements and poor neighbourhoods of Roma people in Europe (Italy, Romania and Spain). He has been working on inter-ethnic relations and conflict resolution in an urban context, and he has been involved in projects on the social conditions of refugees and asylum seekers (with a special focus on migration costs, travel, first reception and employment).
Giuseppe Grimaldi
Giuseppe Grimaldi received a PhD in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Milano Bicocca. His main research areas are about children of immigrants in Italy, Ethiopian and Eritrean diaspora, and the agriculture-migration nexus in southern Europe. He did ethnographic research in Italy, Uk, Ethiopia and Israel. He published on national and international journals and collaborated with several research institutions. Currently he is a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at the University of Trieste and the director of Frontiera Sud Aps, a research-innovation association working on the relation between migrations and local development in southern Italy.
Irene Ponzo
Irene Ponzo is currently the Deputy Director of FIERI. She completed her PhD in Comparative Sociological Research at the University of Turin (Italy) in 2006. She has worked extensively on migrant and refugee integration, integration policies and governance . She has been Project Manager and FIERI’s principal researcher in EU-funded projects on local integration policies and inclusion dynamics (eg. EU-MIA, Concordia Discors), and she has participated in several Horizon2020 projects on migration and asylum (CEASEVAL, MedReset,Welcoming Spaces, Whole-COMM, Bridges).
Emanuela Roman
Emanuela Roman is a researcher at FIERI. She completed her PhD in Human Rights at the University of Palermo, Law Department in 2017. She holds an MA in Human Rights with Honours from the University of Padova, Faculty of Political Sciences (2010) and an LLM (2012) in Comparative Law, Economics and Finance from the International University College of Turin. At FIERI, she has been involved in two migration and asylum-related Horizon2020 projects (MEDRESET and CEASEVAL) and is currently involved in the Horizon2020 projects TRAFIG and BRIDGES. Her main research interests are in the field of EU migration and asylum law and policies, and include migration governance in the Mediterranean area, the externalisation and informalisation of EU migration, asylum and border management policies and their impact on migrant rights, the reception and integration of international protection applicants and beneficiaries in Italy and Europe.