We are delighted to offer a warm welcome to our Visiting Fellows for Trinity term 2025.
This term, our fellows are:
Sara Arapiles is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Law of Lund University. She conducts her research within the interdisciplinary project ‘Refugee Finance: Histories, Frameworks and Practices (REF-FIN)’ where she studies innovative financial instruments aimed at refugees and migrants, particularly refugee bonds, performance-based contracts and concessional loans, with a focus on the institutions, processes and actors involved. Sara teaches and supervises undergraduate and LLM students in human rights law, refugee law, and socio-legal research. Read more.
Serde Atalay is a Doctoral Candidate at the Faculty of Law, Lund University, Sweden. She is in the final year of writing her PhD thesis which investigates migrants’ and refugees’ right to access housing without discrimination in international law beyond a minimalistic social rights paradigm. In her research, she uses migration and asylum as a critical lens to examine the potential strengths and shortcomings of social rights in international law. She teaches public international law, migration law, human rights law, and the right to housing. Read more.
Jinan Bastaki is Associate Professor of Legal Studies at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She focuses on forced displacement, human rights, refugee law, and citizenship. She is particularly interested in the lived experiences of those impacted by the law, how the law regulates access and belonging, and what those experiences reveal about the law itself. Her work has appeared in major publications, including the Journal of Refugee Studies, Citizenship Studies, Refugee Survey Quarterly, and others. At the RSC, Bastaki will be working on the intersections between citizenship, refugeehood, and the right of return. Read more.
Odessa Gonzalez Benson is an associate professor at the University of Michigan. Her areas of research are refugee resettlement, state-civil society relations, critical policy studies (US refugee policy) and epistemic justice. Her research has been published in journals such as Social Services Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Voluntas and Cities. She has a PhD in social welfare from the University of Washington, an MSW from Arizona State University and a BA from the University of the Philippines-Diliman. Read more.
Jane Lilly López is an associate professor of sociology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA. She studies and teaches about issues related to social inequality and social policy, with a focus on international migration, citizenship, and transnationalism. Her book, Unauthorized Love: Mixed-Citizenship Couples Negotiating Intimacy, Immigration, and the State (published in 2021 by Stanford University Press), examines the intersections of immigration, citizenship, and family in the law and in everyday life. Read more.
Patrick Mutinda Muthui is a Consultant with the Poverty and Equity Team at the World Bank in Kenya and previously a National Research Coordinator for the RSC. His research focuses on forced displacement, socio-economic integration, and service delivery for refugees and host communities. He has coordinated several high-impact studies, including projects on refugee economies and livelihoods in Kenya’s Kakuma and Kalobeyei camps. He holds an MA in Refugee Protection and Forced Migration from the University of London and MA in Population Studies from the University of Nairobi. His expertise includes monitoring and evaluation, program management, demographic analysis, and stakeholder engagement in forced migration contexts. Read more.
Yvonne Su is the Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, Canada. Her research is on forced migration, climate change-induced displacement and queer migration. She has worked extensively with vulnerable communities in Southeast Asia and Latin America and the Caribbeans including refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, indigenous peoples and LGBTQ+ communities. She has over 30 publications, including articles in journals like Third World Quarterly, Journal of Gender Studies, and International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction as well as more than 40 opinion pieces, newspaper articles and academic blogs in The Washington Post, The Conversation, and The National Observer. Read more.
Tyler Valiquette is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at University College London and an SSHRC Doctoral Fellow. His research examines queer migration from Venezuela to Brazil and Colombia, with a focus on state-led, humanitarian, and community responses to displacement. Over the past five years, he has conducted over 200 interviews with LGBTQI+ Venezuelan migrants and refugees in São Paulo, Bogotá, Cúcuta, Boa Vista, and Manaus. Read more.
Johanna Wallin is a Doctoral Candidate at the department of child- and youth studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research explores everyday doings of nations amongst families in Sweden with multiple nationalities. Her focus is on how people understand and enact nations in their everyday lives to look at what people do with the nation, and how this in turn contributes to the production and reproduction of nations. Her research builds on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with families in Stockholm, Sweden. Prior to her PhD, Johanna has worked in international development policy, research and implementation with Oxford Policy Management and Girl Effect, amongst others. She holds an MA (Hons) in Politics and International Relations from the University of Aberdeen (2009), and an MPhil in Development Studies from ODID (2015). Read more.