Elena Giacomelli is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bologna (Italy). During her undergraduate studies she focused on Political Science and International Relations, with two semesters exchange at the University of Valencia (Spain) and one semester in the University of Melbourne (Australia). She refined her interests finding out to be fascinated by the research and analysis of the area of international relations dealing with the roots and dynamics of migration and their impact on the stability and legitimacy of societies. She pursued her studies attending a Master in European and International Studies at the University of Trento (Italy). She had the opportunity to spend one semester in the Metropolitan University of Prague (Czech Republic), where she took part in the research project "Current Migration to Europe: Research of Smart Population Dynamics”. As a result, she deep her interest in the migration topic, providing questionnaires survey with immigrants in two transit centers in Vienna. As part of her academic path, she also spent her last semester at the University of Adelaide (Australia) and she took an internship in the Australian Population and Migration Research Center, which provided her an insight on the actual work of research in the field of migration. After this experience, she conducted her Master dissertation research abroad in the Third World Studies Center, University of Philippines (The Philippines), focusing on environmental migration in the country. She completed her Master Degree in October 2016, and she decided to pursue her studies at doctoral level. She is currently undertaking a PhD in the University of Bologna. Miss Giacomelli is conducting an ethnographic research on social works with asylum seekers and refugees in the Autonomous Province of Trento, under the supervision of Professor Pina Lalli. In order to anchor her research to practice, she worked from September 2016 to January 2018 as a social worker for asylum seekers and refugees for Centro Astralli Trento, a no profit organization in the Trentino Province. Miss Giacomelli participated at the SIAA (Società di Antropologia Applicata) Conference in Trento the 21 December 2016, with the publication of an abstract of her presentation concerning the survey experience in the transit camps in Vienna. Lastly, she has been selected by the EUROSA Consortium Selection Committee for a scholarship in the framework of the EUROSA program (“Europe & South Africa Sustainable Partnership for Human Development”). Therefore, she spent a six months research period at PhD level, from January to June 2018, at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town (South Africa) by the supervision of Professor Mulugeta F. Dinbabo and Professor Wessel le Roux. She participated to important and interesting Summer Schools related to her topics of interest: Summer School in Forced Migration and Asylum in Bologna; Summer School on Sociology of Migration, organized by Centro Studi Medì in Genoa; and International Summer School in Ethnography in the University of Trento. Lastly, she participated as a speaker at the first annual CESSMIR Conference titled ‘Needs and Care Practices for Refugees and Migrants’ and at the IV Annual Conference "Migrants and refugees in the law" at the Catholic University of Murcia, Spain
