Keynote Speakers

Begüm Özden Fırat is Professor at the Department of Sociology in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul. She completed her undergraduate education at Ankara University, Faculty of Political Sciences and gained master's degree at METU at the Department of Sociology, and received PhD degree at the University of Amsterdam (ASCA). She works in the fields of visual culture, urban sociology, and social movements studies. She is the co-editor of Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009), Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, Possibilities (Rodopi, 2011) and Aesthetics and Resistance in the age of Global Uprisings (İletişim, 2015). Her book entitled Encounters with the Ottoman Miniature Contemporary Readings of an Imperial Art is published by I.B. Tauris in 2015. She is one of the directors of documentary “Welcome Lenin” (2016) and the director of the short experimental video “The Lightwell” (2020).

Kosmatopoulos Nikolas

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos is an anthropologist, assistant professor at the American University of Beirut, navigator of the Floating Laboratory of Action and Theory At Sea and co-founder of the Decolonize Hellas collective. He teaches and researches on violence and peacemaking, maritime politics and anticolonialism.

Lafazani Olga

Olga Lafazani's research interests develop at the intersections of migration, gender, urban space, borders and grassroots movements. She holds a PhD on "Transanational geographies of migration" from the Department of Geography, Harokopio University, Athens. She has worked in several research projects and her work has been published in international journals. Currently she is an adjunct lecturer in the department of History and Philosophy of Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is also the PI of the research project "One century, Two refugee crisis" (ELIDEK) that aims to untangle the entangled histories of arrivals and departures and the different refugee figures that have shaped and have been shaped within the recent greek history.

Méndez María Luisa

María-Luisa Méndez is associate professor at the Institute of Urban and Territorial Studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She is director of the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies, COES (www.coes.cl) and principal researcher of the “Geographies of Conflict and Cohesion” research line at the centre. María Luisa is currently Senior Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute based at the London School of Economics and Political Science and corresponding editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Prof. Méndez is an urban sociologist with a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Manchester and an M.Phil. in Cultural Studies from the University of Birmingham. Her research interests include the reproduction of inequalities, social mobility and urban conflicts. She is the author of Upper Middle Class Social Reproduction: Wealth, Schooling and Residential Choice in Chile, along with several articles on territorial stigma and reputation, class and space, and contemporary forms of socio spatial inequalities that have been published in journals such as Urban Studies, Urban Geography, Cities, City and Community, among others. Prof. Méndez is currently focusing her work on the role of elite reproduction and fragmentation in the configuration of cities in the Global South

Sigona Nando

Professor Nando Sigona is Chair of International Migration and Forced Displacement and Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity at the University of Birmingham, UK. Nando is a founding editor of the peer reviewed journal Migration Studies (Oxford University Press) and lead editor for Global Migration and Social Change book series by Bristol University Press. His work has appeared in a range of international academic journals, including Sociology, Social Anthropology, Antipode, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Identities, International Migration Review, Citizenship Studies and Ethnic and Racial Studies. He is author or editor of books and journal’s special issues including The Oxford Handbook of Superdiversity (with Meissner and Vertovec, 2022), Undocumented Migration (with Gonzales, Franco and Papoutsi, 2019); Unravelling Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ (with Crawley, Duvell, Jones, and McMahon, 2017), Within and beyond citizenship (with Roberto G. Gonzales, 2017), The Oxford Handbook on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (with Fiddian Qasmiyeh, Loescher and Long, 2014), and Sans Papiers. The social and economic lives of undocumented migrants (with Bloch and Zetter, 2014). He is Senior Research Associate at ODI and held visiting research and teaching positions at the University of Oxford and the European University Institute.

Tazzioli Martina

Martina Tazzioli is Lecturer in Politics & Technology at Goldsmiths, University of london. She is the author of The Making of Migration. The biopoltics of mobility at Europe’s borders (Sage, 2020), Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (2015) and co-author of Tunisia as a Revolutionised Space of Migration (2016). She is co-editor in Chief of the journal Politics and on the editorial board of Radical Philosophy. Her forthcoming book is entitled "Border Abolitionism: migration containment and the genealogies of struggles" (Manchester University Press).

Tulumello Simone

Simone Tulumello (PhD Urban and Regional Planning; University of Palermo) is assistant research professor (investigador auxiliar) at the University of Lisbon, Institute of Social Sciences and member of the scientific committee of the PhD in Development Studies of the University of Lisbon. His appointments include: Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Memphis (2016); Policy Fellow at the B. Hook Institute for Social Change of the University of Memphis (2016-2017); visiting scholar at the Polytechnic of Turin (2019) and the University Federico II of Naples (2021); Senior Expert Evaluator at the Regiostars Awards (European Commission; 2019); deputy editor-in-chief of Análise Social (2021-). His research interests span at the border among human geography, critical urban studies, planning and political economy: urban security and violence; housing policy and politics; austerity and neoliberal urban policy; urban imaginaries; Southern European and Southern US cities. He is author of Fear, Space and Urban Planning: A Critical Perspective from Southern Europe (2017; Springer) and is finalizing his second monograph, with Andrea Pavoni Urban Violence: Ontology, Materiality, Epistemology (under contract with Lexington Books).

Verdeil Eric

Eric Verdeil is professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Sciences Po Paris, and the scientific director of the Master’s Degree Territorial and Urban Strategies (Sciences Po Urban School), and a researcher at the Centre for International Research. After graduating in Geography and in Urban Planning, Eric Verdeil earned a PhD in Geography (2002, Université Paris I-Sorbonne). He worked at the French Institute of the Near East (IFPO), Beirut and then as a CNRS Research fellow at the University of Lyon and later at the research team LATTS at University Paris Est. His interests include the sociology and history of urbanism, reconstructions and the political ecology of urban infrastructure (energy, water, solid waste). He conducted most of his research in the Middle East and particularly in Lebanon, after a dissertation dealing with planning cultures and urban politics through the case of Beirut’s reconstruction. His fieldworks then expanded towards the South and the East of the Mediterranean, most notably Jordan and Tunisia, as well as the Paris Region. He currently coordinates Hybridelec, a research project funded by the French National Agency of Research on Electric Hybrids: Emerging forms of the energy transition in Cities of the Global South. His publications include Concevoir et gérer les villes. Milieux d’urbanistes du Sud de la Méditerranée (coedited with Taoufik Souami, 2006, Economica), Beyrouth et ses urbanistes : une ville en plans (2010, IFPO), several editions in French, Arabic and English of the Atlas of Lebanon (last one in 2019, coedited with Ghaleb Faour from CNRS Lebanon) and several theme issues in academic journals. His last book is Atlas des mondes urbains (Presses de Sciences Po, with the Atelier cartographique de Sciences Po). See the full list of publications with links to online papers.

Vradis Antonis

Antonis is a geographer with an urban focus, a migration inclination and a political urge to make sense of our turbulent times. In 2021 he founded the Radical Urban Lab at St Andrews, where he serves as Director, working with an immensely talented and committed group of colleagues across academic hierarchies and disciplines. One of the Lab's main drives is to understand how cities and transient populations staying within, and traveling through them face up to the multiple crises of our times.