CONFERENCE
Tenured Professor Inta Mieriņa
Tenured Professor at FESS, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Migration Research at the University of Latvia. Her research interests include political sociology, migration, integration, social capital and public goods, as well as political attitudes and behaviour, and issues related to youth and education. I. Mieriņa has participated in numerous international studies and led several migration research projects, including the largest survey of Latvian emigrants, which covered 14,068 respondents across 118 countries. Prof. Mieriņa regularly provides expertise to Latvian policymakers on migration and integration issues and serves as an evaluator of research projects for the European Commission.
Paride Carrara
Postdoctoral researcher on the WICE project at the University of Latvia. He holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the University of Bologna and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Milan. His research focuses on party politics and voter behaviour, coupled with a strong expertise in computational social sciences, and natural language processing in particular.
Maria Lompe
PhD student at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Doctoral School of Humanities, Theology and Art. M. Lompe is pursuing her doctoral dissertation in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her research interests focus on internet studies, with particular emphasis on controversy mapping using digital methods and disinformation research. She contributes to several scientific projects dedicated to the study of new technologies and social media, and is the co-author of several scholarly publications analysing Russian disinformation in the Polish online sphere.
Diego Caballero-Vélez
He earned his PhD at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Messina and the Centre of Migration Research (University of Warsaw), as well as visiting research appointments at the University of Oxford, the European University Institute, and the SGH Warsaw School of Economics. D. Vélez research focuses on EU migration governance, with particular emphasis on Central and Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean region. His broader academic interests include political economy, international security studies, and EU foreign policy. He is also a former Blue Book trainee at the European Commission’s Research Executive Agency, his work has been presented at numerous international conferences and published in leading journals, including “Journal of Common Market Studies”, “European Politics and Society”, and “Perspectives on Politics”, among others. He is the author of the book “Contesting Migration Crises in Central Eastern Europe”.
Réka Tamássy
Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Latvia, working on the WICE project. Previously, she worked as a researcher at the Budapest University of Economics and Business. R. Tamássy earned her PhD in Sociology from Corvinus University of Budapest, where she explored the discursive construction of Roma and LGBTQIA+ people in Hungarian online political communication. Her research interests include the portrayal of marginalized social groups in (social) media and political communication, as well as minority representation and meaning-making in politically sensitive contexts, particularly analysing how these processes shape social exclusion.