Plenary Speakers

Els de Graauw is Professor of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Migration Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She is interested in immigration, civil society organizations, urban politics, government bureaucracies, public policy, and qualitative research methods, with a focus on understanding how governmental and nongovernmental organizations build institutional capacity for immigrant integration and representation.

Els is the author of Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco (2016), co-author of Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston (2024), and co-editor of Migrants, Minorities, and the Media: Information, Representations, and Participation in the Public Sphere (2017). For more information, click here.

Valentina Mazzucato is Professor of Globalisation & Development. She founded and directed the research programme on Globalisation, Transnationalism and Development from 2012 to 2020.

Her expertise is on migration studied from a transnational perspective. In particular she studies the effects of migration between Africa and Europe on migrants and their families and communities back home. Mazzucato has led 5 international, multi-year projects on transnational migration between Africa and Europe in which she collaborates with European and African universities.

She helped establish and is Executive Board member of the Maastricht Center for Citizenship, Migration and Development (MACIMIDE). She served on the Steering Committee of NWO-WOTRO Science for Global Development (2017-2024) and a panel member of the ERC Advanced Grants (2017-2024). Prof. Mazzucato received a prestigious ERC Consolidator grant for the project Mobility Trajectories of Young Lives: Transnational Youth in Global South and North (MO-TRAYL) (2017-2023). Moreover, Mazzucato is elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), one of the highest academic distinctions in the Netherlands.

Merlin Schaeffer is a professor of sociology at the University of Copenhagen and a Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He studies how international immigration is transforming societies, currently with a particular focus on citizens’ clashing views on the definition and prevalence of discrimination. His work draws on diverse social theories and research methods to gain insights on challenges to equality and social cohesion in increasingly diverse societies. Previously, Schaeffer taught at the University of Cologne and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the WZB’s Migration, Integration, Transnationalization research unit. He holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam and completed his graduate and undergraduate education at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Schaeffer was a visiting scholar at Sciences Po Paris and the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He also held visiting positions at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Harvard University. He currently serves as an associate editor of the European Sociological Review and was an associate editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2019-2023).