Team

Our team consists of four women working in Sweden and the UK

Gabriella Elgenius is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Gothenburg (GU), previously at University of Oxford and University of London. She has lead and co-lead on large scale programmes on nation-building and cultural heritage (ERC), on mixed methods projects on identities, diaspora communities (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy and John Fell Foundation in the United Kingdom). Elgenius has held a Marie Curie Fellowship at the London School of Economics and a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Sociology and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. She is co-applicant on the research programme: The Challenges of Polarization on the Swedish Labour Market and leading the work package on migration and polarization (PI Tomas Berglund, Forte). Elgenius has interviewed in migrant communities and among disadvantaged groups hit by the recession or austerity cuts ( see e.g. Elgenius, 2011, 2014, 2017). She has problematized the binary nature and conceptualization of bonding and bridging capital, and contested concepts of identity, community, social solidarity and nationalism as a discourse of social solidarity.

Jenny Phillimore directs the Institute for Research into Superdiversity and Professor of Migration at the University of Birmingham. Over the past decade she has managed teams of researchers focusing on access to health, education, employment, training, and housing integration with a particular focus on integration and organisational change in the UK and the EU. Phillimore is a Fellow of the RSA and of the Academy of the Social Sciences and has advised local, regional, national and European Government. She currently leads a project (funded by the Europe and Global Challenges programme) to explore the resilience and vulnerability of forced migrants to sexual and gender based violence across the refugee journey working closely with in civil society, state, private and transnational providers. Phillimore spent five years at the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC) at the University of Birmingham and she is aptly placed to facilitate collaborations with international scholars, practitioners, policy makers to explore key issues affecting charities and voluntary organisations and community groups.

Juta Kawalerowicz works at Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University and the Institute for Analytical Sociology, at Linköping University. Kawalerowicz has experience of conducting social research in academia, civil service as well as third sector organisations in Poland, the UK and Sweden. Currently, she works with Swedish register data to look at how Swedes react to increasing diversity in their local neighborhoods.

Magda Borkowska works at the Understanding Society Policy Unit, University of Essex. She conducts research on political integration of ethnic minorities in Britain. Borkowska worked on a number of integration-related projects with policy makers, including: ‘Integration Gaps’ project in collaboration with DCLG (2016), ‘Vulnerabilities to Electoral Fraud’ project in collaboration with Electoral Commission (2014-2015), ‘Racism in the Workplace’ project in collaboration with the Trade Unions Congress (2017) and ‘Indicators of integration’ with the Home Office (2018/2019).