LECTURERS


SECOND EDITION - Lampedusa, 2021


DIONIGI ALBERA


Dionigi Albera is an anthropologist and senior research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is based at the IDEMEC (Institute of European Mediterranean and Comparative Ethnology, Aix-Marseille University), which he has directed from 2006 to 2016. His research has focused on Europe and the Mediterranean, and his interests include migration, kinship and family, pilgrimage and interfaith mixing. 
He has published two personal books, 33 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and 70 book chapters. He has edited 16 books and 3 journal issues. A book he edited on interfaith pilgrimages in the Mediterranean was first published in French, and then translated into Spanish, English and Italian.
Among his latest books are: Sharing sacred spaces in the Mediterranean. Christians, Muslims and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries, edited with Maria Couroucli, Indiana University Press, 2012; Reframing the History of Family and Kinship: From the Alps towards Europe, edited with Luigi Lorenzetti et Jon Mathieu, Peter Lang, 2016; Dictionnaire de la Méditerranée, edited with Maryline Crivello et Mohamed Tozy, Actes Sud, 2016; New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies, edited with John Eade, Routledge, 2017.
He is one of the curators of the touring exhibition Shared Sacred Sites held at the Museum of Mediterranean and European Civilizations in Marseille (Mucem, 2015), the Bardo Museum, Tunis (2016), the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Photography, Thessaloniki (2017), the National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris (2017-2018) and the Museum of Confluences-Dar el-Bacha, Marrakesh (2018), New York Public Library, Morgan Library and Museum and James Gallery, New York (2018), Depo, Istanbul (2019) CerModern, Ankara (2021).


NADJA DUMANN


Nadja Dumann has recently finished her PhD in International Relations at the Brussels School of International Studies of the University of Kent. Her research focuses on independent irregular youth migration from Morocco to countries in Europe, looking at how this specific flow of migration can be explained by developments in the global economy and EU migration policy. She obtained her MA in International Migration Studies at the Brussels School of International Studies of the University of Kent in Belgium and her BA in International Studies at the Open University in the United Kingdom. She has over 15 years of professional experience in immigration, integration, migration and development in the academic, public and private sectors. She is also a legal guardian for unaccompanied minors in Belgium. 


MARIA PISANI


Maria Pisani holds a PhD in adult education, and an MA and a BA in Youth & Community Studies. She is an academic, youth and community worker and an activist, her engagement in the field provides opportunities for ongoing praxis.
Maria has published in international journals and contributed to a number of edited books and has been appointed as key expert in a number of inter/national research studies. Her research interests include forced migration with a special focus on borderlands, and the intersectionality of inter alia race/ethnicity, gender, age, legal status, disability; critical pedagogy and critical youth studies. Her academic work is unapologetically political and committed to social justice.


STEFANO MALATESTA


Stefano Malatesta is Senior Researcher at the “Riccardo Massa” Department of Human Sciences for Education (University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy). In 2008, he completed is PhD program in Models, Languages and Tradition of the Western Culture at University of Ferrara. His PhD thesis focused the political response to flood hazard. He is member of the Board of the Marine Research and High Education Center (MaRHE) in Faaf-Magoodhoo (Rep of Maldives) and of the Executive Committee of the International Small Islands Studies Association (ISISA). He is Vice Coordinator of the Post Graduate Course in Marine Sciences at University of Milano-Bicocca where he teaches Human Geography of Small Island Systems, and Coastal and Maritime Tourism. He is chair of the Working Group on Small Island and Archipelagos (AGeI) and member of the Research Group on Marine Environmental Education (GREAM). He coordinated an interdisciplinary research group on European Citizenship (2012-2015).
In 2017 he has been awarded from the Italian Geographical Society (Società Geografica Italiana) with a special mention for under-40 geographers in Italy. He serves as advisor for UNESCO. His main research topics are: human geography of small islands, geopolitics of Indian Ocean, Ocean Literacy, citizen sciences, children geographies, citizenship education and education for sustainable development.


CAMILLE FAUCOURT


Camille Faucourt is the curator of the Mobility and Intercultural collections at Mucem, Marseille. Art historian, she has a background in Native American Studies and is the author of A la conquête de l'Ouest : collectes amérindiennes de la Smithsonian Institution conservées au Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (Paris, Ecole du Louvre, 2020). Graduate of the National Heritage Institute, her current research and exhibition projects lead her to question the colonial history of the Mediterranean and its legacies through the prism of contemporary mobilities, including tourism and migration. She is notably co-curator of the annual cycle of exhibitions and conferences "Algeria-France: The Voice of Objects" and the temporary exhibition “Body. Gaze. Power. A cultural history of the bath” (Mucem and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 2020). Her next exhibitions projects include “Abd el-Kader” (April 2022), “Bath Time!” (Mucem – Archaeological Museum, Chania, Crete, May 2022), "Revenir: Poetics of Return in the Mediterranean" (2023), and “Another History of the World” (2023).


GIOVANNA DI MATTEO


Giovanna Di Matteo holds a Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Padova. Her doctoral research project is titled “Migrant Support Volunteer Tourism in Border-Islands. Space and Memory in Lampedusa (Italy) and Lesvos (Greece)”. She graduated in Intercultural Development of Touristic Systems at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice with a thesis titled “Tourism and migration. Lampedusa as a laboratory of social sustainability”.
Her research interests include Critical Tourism, Memory Studies, Mobility Studies, Migration Studies and Island Studies and Gender Studies. She is author of publications in academic journals and books on tourism, human geography and gender studies.
Giovanna had different experiences in the field of educational and cultural activities, e.g. she planned and held workshops for children and teenagers at the Museum of Geography of the University of Padova.



FIRST EDITION - Malta, 2019


MEGHANN ORMOND


As a cultural geographer, an immigrant and ardent fan of the transformative potential of international travel, Meghann Ormond is deeply invested in and concerned with how differently-mobile people's roots, rights and vulnerabilities are recognised and included in the places they visit and in which they live. 
Meghann is Associate Professor in Cultural Geography at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. She is passionate about exploring international travel's capacity to expose people to diverse ways of being in the world and instil in them greater awareness of and sensitivity to humankind's interconnectedness and mutual accountability. Something of a global nomad herself, she's spent nearly all of her adult life outside of the United States and is a dual US and Portuguese citizen. She's studied and worked in Canada, Morocco, Belgium, Portugal, Scotland, Malaysia and the Netherlands. Meghann draws on this international experience in her research and teaching on diverse facets of cross-border mobility. Her main research interests include 1) transnational medical and long-term care, 2) migrants' integration and heritage-making practices, and 3) travel and recreational opportunities for people with disabilities. This work has led to collaborations with scholars, governmental bodies and non-governmental organisations in Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, the UK and the US. In her societal outreach, she collaborates with and contributes to established and emerging initiatives on migrant heritage and accessible tourism in the Netherlands. 
She is on the board of the Expatriate Archive Centre in The Hague and collaborates with Pocket Stories in the Roots Guide project. Meghann has published over 30 articles, chapters and books, with her work appearing in journals like Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Mobilities, Environment and Planning D, and Social Science and Medicine.


JUTTA LAUTH BACAS



Jutta Lauth Bacas holds a doctorate in social anthropology from the University of Zurich with a special focus on migration studies. She has held teaching positions at universities in Switzerland and Germany and also worked as a senior researcher at the Academy of Athens, Greece, were she conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork on irregular migration and transit migration through Greece. The first of her three ethnographic projects was situated on the Greek-Turkish border island of Lesbos, where an analysis of clandestine arrivals and reception of undocumented boat migrants took place. The following research project of Jutta was conducted in Athens, investigating survival strategies of undocumented migrants with special focus on legalisation processes and asylum procedures in Greece. In Athens, she closely cooperated with the Greek Council for Refugees and other NGOs supporting undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. Finally, in the port city of Patras, Greece a third ethnographic research project took place, analysing migrants' strategies of irregular exiting Greece and clandestine crossing to Italy.
In the context of transnational border studies, Jutta Lauth Bacas has published widely on irregular migration to Greece, agency and legal rights of undocumented migrants in Greece in edited volumes and journals, between others the Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Ethnologia Balkanica and Ethnologia Europaea. In 2011 and 2013, she acted as co-editor of special issues of the Journal of Mediterranean Studies (JMS 20:1 Special Issue ''Unfolding Perspectives in Mediterranean Anthropology', and JMS 22:2 Special Issue  ‘Reflecting Anthropology in the Mediterranean’). Currently she is Research Affiliate at the Mediterranean Institute of the University of Malta, monitoring developments in the field of political culture, political rights and refugee reception in Greece with special focus on the newly established ‘Hot Spot’ reception centre in Moria, Lesbos.


SAMIRA MECHRI



Samira Mechri has obtained a BA in English,  a diploma in Translation studies, Faculty of Arts, La Manouba University, Tunisia, an MA in Cultural Studies, University of Warwick, England, a certificate in Migration Studies (Gender and Migration), University of Hannover, Germany, and a PhD in Cultural Studies on a joint programme between the University of Warwick, England and the Faculty of Arts, La Manouba, Tunisia. She is a senior lecturer in cultural studies, Migration studies, Regional Studies and the coordinator of the MA in English and International Relations. She is also a member of the teaching staff of the Department of Culture and Society, University of Palermo. She was the Head of the Department of English at the Higher Institute of Human Sciences and a member of the National Commission for Curriculum Development at the Ministry of Higher Education from 2011 to 2017. She is the coordinator of the double diploma in International Relations between the University of Tunis EL Manar and the University of Palermo, Italy, and the Erasmus+coordinator at the UTM. She is the co-editor of Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017).


DANIELA DEBONO


Daniela is Senior Lecturer in International Migration and Ethnic Relations at the Department of Global Political Studies, and Marie Curie COFAS Research Fellow at the Malmö Institute for the Studies of Migration, Welfare and Diversity, both at Malmö University. She was a research fellow for two years at the European University Institute between 2016-2018. An anthropologist by training, she has conducted three ethnographic projects on irregular migration and human rights practices in Malta, deportation practices from Sweden and hospitality practices on the external borders of the EU with a focus on Italy and Malta. In relation to these projects, she has published on irregular migration and human rights in the Mediterranean, hospitality in the immigration field, on EU and Swedish return and deportation practices, on citizenship and on children's rights.
Daniela is the country expert for Malta at the EUDO Citizenship Observatory, European University Institute and has authored a series of reports on citizenship law and policy, naturalisation and access to electoral rights. She is also an Affiliate Researcher at the Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta.


MARIO GERADA



Mario Gerada has a degree in social work and worked in the fields of child protection and drug addiction. For a number of years, he worked in the fields of development and migration focusing on policy analysis, campaigning and project coordination in a range of areas including Aidwatch, Development Education and refugee rights.  He also worked as a researcher on a number of research projects which looked at discrimination and violence on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity, gender and other minority or marginalized groups. In 2014, Mario carried out work for the Ministry for the Family and Social Solidarity focusing on work in relation to separated and unaccompanied children. Mario also carried out work for the President’s Foundation for the Wellbeing of Society in relation to international affairs and environmental issues. He presently Chairs the National Hub for Ethnobotanical Research. 
Mario, now works full-time at JRS Malta. He has a Master in Christian Spirituality from the University of Malta and is one of the founding members of the Maltese Catholic/Christian groups Drachma LGBTI and Drachma Parents’ group.


VIRGINIA MONTEFORTE


Virginia Monteforte is an anthropologist, literary translator and photographer. Her work deals with social memory, politics, material culture, migration and literature in the Mediterranean. She studied at La Sapienza in Rome where she graduated in Ethno-Anthropology and then at the EHESS in Paris where she got a PhD in Social Anthropology and Ethnology. She is a visiting lecturer at the University of Malta and one of the coordinators of Rima (www.rimaproject.org), a voluntary organisation dealing with displacement and exile. 


ISABEL FARAH


Isabel Farah has studied ARTS in Pisa where she graduated in french literature; she has done an internship as italian lecturer at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and has worked as an event manager for the contemporary history library Biblioteca Franco Serantini in Pisa. She has studied biomechanical theatre, through which she tries to funnel her interests for gender studies and mythological narratives. She currently lives in Malta where she joined the Rima project.


ANA ROSA LOUIS


Ana Rosa Louis is an artist/illustrator. Her work is influenced by her studies in Anthropology, Jungian psychology, witchcraft, food symbolism and exploration of Love from a Sufi perspecive. Her personal background is very mixed ethnically. She has English, Dutch/Portuguese, Indian/Sri lankan roots. She is a freelance illustrator for the British Psychological society magazine (The Psychologist), she was a chalkboard artist/retail assistant for Natoora. She i now based in Calabria, Italy. She is working voluntarily with refugees and mainly focusing on helping one woman develop her dressmaking business.