Currently, I have found myself living in Sweden (Linköping), with my beautiful family in which we everyday express our αγάπη/amor (love/kärlek), στοργή/afecto (affection/tillgivenhet), φροντίδα/cuidado (care/omsorg) and θυμό/rabia (anger/ilska) in multiple languages, while our memories and attachments have the smell of the Mediterranean Sea as much as the smell of arepas from the streets of Bogota. Thus, I would say that I am a social researcher dedicated to qualitative interdisciplinary research that has everyday experience as its entry point. Although I am mainly academically trained in sociology and specialised in critical migration studies, having lived experience as my compass has endowed me with an epistemic toolkit to comprehend the entanglements of mobility, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality and class in a globalised world that is infiltrated by coloniality and capitalism.
My current research projects include (de)coloniality of feminist knowledge within the Swedish academia and beyond, gender-based violence and the Swedish paradox of gender equality, and the colonial foundations of international higher education prior and during Covid-19.
Research History
Since my bachelor in Sociology at Panteion University, Greece, I became interested in migration, which led me to my masters in Migration and Transnationalism in Nottingham, UK. Despite the limited duration of an MA in the UK (1 year), I conducted participant observation and in-depth interviews with international students in order to discuss their experiences through the lens of transnational studies. This first contact with qualitative research in the field of migration sparked even more my interest in following this academic trajectory.
In my doctoral research in the UK, I focused on how UK academic institutions are embedded in the control and management of mobility as well as founded upon euromodern discourses and neoliberal capitalist imperatives. Along with engaging with postcolonial feminist literature, my thesis was also carried out with an epistemological feminist sensitivity. That is, I paid special attention to how I produce knowledge, questioning the standardised analytical tools and methodological strategies which were developed in a white, hetero-patriarchal, and positivistic academia. I translated this feminist reclaiming of producing knowledge otherwise into a methodological experiment using both one-to-one interviews and collective memory-work (CMW) with a group of PhD international students.
In my previous and ongoing work, I have embraced CMW as a methodological approach to re-politicise and re-historicise experience and memory within academic research, abandoning at the same time the distinct boundaries between researchers and researched and the split between theory and methodology. Thus, as a researcher and teacher, my entry point has always been everyday experience and memory, understood as relational, situated and socio-political.
Current main project:
For my postdoctoral research I initiated a collective of gender studies scholars from different ethnic/national backgrounds in which we could start an honest conversation about our embodied experiences with being Othered within the Swedish academia and society. Despite our different backgrounds that span from Antiracism to Indigenous feminisms and queer death studies, we all share a common passion about thinking with situated others and co-creating knowledge. Together, we have engaged with creative methodological alternatives, such as automatic writing, collective memory-work, exchange of letters, poetry and fiction.
Current teaching responsibilities:
Director of the course Justice and Equality in Organisations, Master’s in Gender Studies, Department of Gender, Studies, Linköping University.
Lecturer and seminar leader, “LGBTIQ* genealogies: (im)possible alliances and genealogies”, undergraduate course: Are we sisters after all? Gender and postcolonialism, Department of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden.
