FIERI

FIERI (Forum Internazionale ed Europeo di Ricerche sull’Immigrazione, www.fieri.it) is an independent, no-profit institute. It is one 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 a constant empirical focus on national and local developments and through proactive interaction with policy, media, and civil society.

The study of migration trends and migration policies in the Mediterranean context has been one of the core missions of FIERI since the beginning of its activity.

The Research Team

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, such as the National Council of Economy and Labour and the Schengen Parliamentary Committee, and international organisations, including IOM and ILO. Migration and migration policies in the Mediterranean are among Pastore’s main fields of specialisation.
Irene Ponzo
Irene Ponzo
Irene Ponzo (female) is the Deputy Director of FIERI. She completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Sociological Research at the University of Turin (Italy) in 2006. In 20013 she was Visiting Scholar at COMPAS of the University of Oxford. Her research interests focus on inclusion processes and integration policies with specific attention to policy-making processes. She has participated in several EU projects and she was recently project manager of the EU-funded project “Concordia Discors. Understanding Conflict and Integration Outcomes of Inter-group Interactions and Integration Policies in Selected Neighbourhoods in Five European Cities”. She was also the FIERI principal researcher in the EU-MIA project (“European Migrant Integration Academy. An integrated research and cooperative learning project to reinforce integration capacities in European cities”), and a key member of the research team in “CLIP – Cities for Local Integration Policy for migrants”.
Ester Salis
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 (see www.labmiggov.eu) 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. Her main fields of interests are in labour migration governance and policies, care labour migration and migrant domestic work, labour market integration, transnational practices and the role of diasporas in development processes.
Emanuela Roman
Emanuela Roman
Emanuela Roman is a PhD candidate in Human Rights at the University of Palermo, Law Department. Since 2012 she collaborates as a junior researcher with FIERI and with the Human Rights and Migration Law Clinic at the International University College of Turin (IUC). She was one of the FIERI researchers in the EU-MIA project (2012-2014). 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, migration management and immigration detention. Her PhD research project is focused on the external dimension of the EU migration policy in the Mediterranean area. She investigates in particular cooperation on readmission both at the European and bilateral level, and its implications on the human rights of (to be) readmitted migrants.