The Gender Committee

Dr Colleen Boland represents the UAB in the Gender Committee. She holds an M.A. in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She obtained her PhD in Sociology and Anthropology from the Complutense University of Madrid, specialising in migration studies. She has served as Managing Editor of the international quarterly International Journal of Health Services and Research Manager at the Common Action Forum. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Mengia Tschalaer is a Research Fellow at Brunel Law School and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology and Political Science at City University of New York. As a legal anthropologist, she examines how Westernized conceptions of human rights affect the access to justice of minority groups at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and religion. Her work is geared towards rendering visible those voices located at the margins that remain silenced – often very deliberately so – in conversations about justice and ideals about the truth. Mengia Tschalaer is the recipient of the prestigious Marie Curie Individual Fellowship (2018-2020) for her project on queer asylum in Germany. Her research further received support from the Swiss National Science Foundation, University of Zurich, the Gunda-Werner Institute, the ESRC, and Columbia University. She is the co-founder and coordinator of the Queer European Asylum Network and the author of “Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice: Gender, Law, and Activism in India” (Cambridge University Press, 2017) as well as of various articles and chapters on socio-legal resistance, LGBTQI+ asylum, gender and sexuality, and Islam.

Dr Esther Zapater Duque represents the UAB in the Gender Committee. She is graduated in law from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1989. She received her doctorate from the UAB after completing doctoral and tertiary studies in several centres: Master in Law and European Institutions by the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) in 1990, DEA at the University of Paris-II Panthéon-Assas (France) in 1992, and Postgraduate diploma in European Studies at the UAB in 1995. She has worked as an advisor to the European Union Commission in the Directorate-General for Energy and has taken Research internships at the European University Institute in Florence, the International University Institute of Luxembourg and the University of Bologna. She is associate professor of Public International Law and International Relations at the UAB and she has been the Dean of the Law School of the UAB from 2013 to 2019. She has been visiting professor at several European universities (Panthéon-Assas, Moscow State Law Academy, Toulouse-Capitole), as well as Spanish universities (Autonomous University of Madrid, University of Salamanca). She also is member of the Foreign Policy Observatory linked to the Instituto de Barcelona de Estudios Internacionales (IBEI).

Paola Maieli represents the Italian Red Cross (CRI) in the Gender Committee. She has an extensive experience in civil society development (humanitarian aid, local economic development/institutional capacity building and human rights advocacy, monitoring and advising) with particular attention to refugees, IDPs and minority communities. She has acquired consolidated experience in planning, management, monitoring and evaluation of EU-funded projects, related to human rights promotion and humanitarian assistance, through the lens of human rights based and Community- Rights Based approach. She has very good analytic and reporting skills and ability to draft evaluation and factual report on human rights compliance, political situation and rule of law.

Prof. Dr Floya Anthias is a member of the Independent Gender Committee within ITFLOWS. She is Emeritus Professor in Sociology and Social Justice at the University of Roehampton. She has written extensively on issues of ‘race’, ethnicity, migration, class and gender. She has an extensive record of publications on topics like Ethnicity and Nationalism, Social Divisions and Intersectionality, Gender, Ethnicity, Racism, Social and Collective Identities, Identity and Belonging, Multiculturalism, Political identities, Social Theory, Cultural Theory, Social Inequalities, Social Exclusion and Stratification, Gender, Ethnicity and Employment, Transnationalism, Transnational and trans-border crossings, Population movements, Migration theory, Human Rights and Global Citizenship, new migrations, among others.

Prof. Dr Eleonore Kofman is a member of the Independent Gender Committee within ITFLOWS. She is Professor of Gender, Migration and Citizenship in Middlesex. Prior to joining Middlesex in 2005 as Professor of Gender, Migration and Citizenship, she was Professor of Human Geography at Nottingham Trent University. Her interest in gender and migration goes back to the early 1990s since when she has written a number of articles and books in this field, especially on family migrations, skilled migrations and care and social reproduction. Other research interests have included political geography, nationalism and cosmopolitanism and  Henri Lefebvre’s urban writings.

She has conducted research funded by AHRC, ESRC, Equality and Human Rights Commission; European Commission (FP7, DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion; Rights, Equality and Citizenship); European Agency of Fundamental Rights, European Network of Migrant Women,  Office of the Children’s Commissioner (England) and UN Women. She has recently completed with Prof. Erica Howard a project  PHS Quality (2018-2020) covering 10 EU for DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, where she examined the working conditions of domiciliary care workers in the UK and how to improve them. Currently, she is the co-Director of the Migration and Displacement stream of the UKRI GCRF Hub – Gender, Justice and Security (2019-2024), led by the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security and co-Investigator of the project Gendered Dynamics of Labour Migrations. Middlesex collaborates with academic and NGO partners across the Middle East and South Asia. I am Joint Editor in Chief of Work, Employment and Society, a journal of the British Sociological Association and co-Director of the Social Policy Research Centre. She is also a member of the Executive Board and Board of Directors of IMISCOE (International Migration, Social Cohesion and Integration), the largest European network of scholars in the area of migration and integration

Louise Hooper is a barrister at Garden Court Chambers in the UK.  She has practiced refugee and migration law since the late 1990s.  She gained extensive experience working on cases involving human rights, migration and trafficking in human beings and has been a regular contributor to the leading practitioner textbook ‘Macdonalds Immigration Law & Practice’ since 1997.  She co-authored The International Commission of Jurist’s Practitioner guide to Refugee Claims based on Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity (2016) and contributed the chapter on identification of victims of trafficking and the national referral mechanism in ‘Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery Law and Practice’ (Bloomsbury, 2018).  As an international expert on migration and gender for the Council of Europe she has engaged in treaty monitoring, wrote ‘Gender-based asylum claims and non-refoulement: Articles 60 and 61 of the Istanbul Convention’ (2019) and was the international expert to the Gender Equality Commission Drafting Committee on Migrant Women drafting Recommendation CM/Rec/(2022)17 of the Committee of Ministers to member States on protecting the rights of migrant, refugee and asylum seeking women and girls (adopted 22 May 2022).  Louise has also trained judges, decision makers, lawyers and NGOs across Europe on best practice in respect of gender and migration on behalf of GREVIO and in conjunction with the UNHCR and GRETA.  She is currently working as a consultant on human rights, data protection and ethics in technology and AI.