Forum Internazionale ed Europeo di Richerche sull’Immigrazione (FIERI)
Italy
FIERI (Forum Internazionale ed Europeo di Ricerche sull’Immigrazione) is one of 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 constant empirical attention to national and local developments and through proactive interaction with policy, media and civil society.
FIERI is an independent, non-profit institute. Funding of FIERI research activities comes from a variety of public and private (mainly foundations) sources.
Staff
Ferruccio Pastore
Ferruccio Pastore, PhD (European University Institute, 1996), is the Director of FIERI since May 2009. He has previously been 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 (among which the National Council of Economy and Labour and the Schengen Parliamentary Committee) and international organisations (among which IOM and ILO). He has written extensively on the structure and the evolution of European governance in the field of migration and asylum.
Irene Ponzo
Irene Ponzo is currently the Deputy Director of FIERI. She completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Sociological Research at the University of Turin (Italy) in 2006. Her research interests regard two main topics: integration policies with a specific attention to policy-making processes, policy communities and policy transfer; migrants’ integration processes with particular regard to integration conceptualisation and operativisation and to ethnic boundary-making dynamics. In the last few years she was project manager and FIERI’s principal researcher in several EU-funded projects. She is co-chair of the IMISCOE Research Group “Integration crises. Analysing integration processes in an age of global instability”. She is a key staff member of the Jean Monet Module “Economics of European migration: data, facts, the effect in the destination countries and the effect in the sending countries” (University of Turin, 2017-2019) with teaching responsibilities on the multilevel governance of migration.
Ester Salis
Ester Salis graduated in International Cooperation and Development in 2007 at the University of Turin with a thesis on Migration and Co-development between Italy and Senegal. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Milan since 2015. After a one-year long internship at the International Training Centre of the ILO in Turin and at the ILO’s Headquarters in Geneva (2008-2009) she joined the FIERI team in 2010, since then working as researcher and collaborating in a number of national and international research projects. In particular, she was member of the LAB-MIG-GOV research team where she carried out research on the Italian case and co-coordinated with Ferruccio Pastore (FIERI’s director) activities of the WP3 on sending states’ perspectives and strategies in the field of labour migration (with a focus on Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia as key case studies). More recently, she has been researching on the impact of the economic crisis on migration and integration dynamics in the Mediterranean area and on the management of mixed flows across the Mediterranean. Her main fields of interests are in labour migration governance and policies, care labour migration and migrant domestic work, labour market integration, mixed flows and asylum policies.
Tiziana Caponio
Tiziana Caponio, Ph.D. in Political Science at the University Cesare Alfieri of Florence, is associate professor at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Societies of the University of Turin where she teaches Dynamics and Policies of Migration. She is research fellow at FIERI and at Collegio Carlo Alberto. Her main research topic regards migration policy and policymaking processes in a multilevel governance perspective, aimed at making sense of the complex interactions between supra-national (mainly EU), national and local levels of government and between public and private actors in the production of immigration and immigrant integration policies. She is currently working on a research project on transnational city networks’ mobilisation on refugees’ reception, aimed at unravelling how cities-EU relations are unfolding in the context of the current crisis. She is cochair of the IMISCOE Standing Committee on “The Multilevel Governance of Migration”, and member of the research network on migration of the Council for European Studies at Columbia University.
Emanuela Roman
Emanuela Roman holds a PhD in Human Rights at the University of Palermo, Law Department. Since 2012 she is researcher at FIERI and research associate at the Human Rights and Migration Law Clinic at the International University College of Turin (IUC) and University of Turin, Law Department. Emanuela holds a Master Degree in Human Rights (MA) with Honours from the University of Padova, Faculty of Political Sciences (2010). She holds an LLM (2012) and an MSc (2013) in Comparative Law, Economics and Finance from the International University College of Turin (IUC). Her main research interests are in the field of EU migration and asylum law and policies, international refugee law, and migration management in the European context. Her PhD thesis focuses on the external dimension of the EU migration policy in the Mediterranean area; it investigates formal and informal cooperation on readmission at the European and bilateral level, and its implications on the human rights of migrants and protection seekers. As part of FIERI staff, Emanuela has participated in the EU-MIA project (2012-2014) and is currently involved in the H2020 MedReset project (2016-2018).
Andrea Pogliano
Andrea Pogliano is currently lecturer in Sociology of Media and Communication at the University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy where he teaches Sociology of communication and Media sociology since 2009. He is research affiliate at FIERI and editorial member of the italian journal Sociologica. He completed his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Milan (Italy) in 2008. He was a Marie Curie fellow at IRESCO/CNRS in Paris in 2003 and 2004 and visiting scholar at EHESS from 2005 to 2007. His main research interests lie in the sociology of journalism and photojournalism, media and immigration, media and conflicts, political communication and framing processes, both in the production and in the reception of news. From 2006 he collaborated as a researcher to several national and international projects. He is currently researching on narrative-making strategies and refugee crisis in urban contexts, with a project funded by the Urban Communication Foundation.