Dr Elena Giacomelli

Elena Giacomelli is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology and Business of Law at the University of Bologna. She is now working on environmental change and migration dynamics. She obtained a PhD, conducting an ethnographic research on social workers with asylum seekers and refugees. In order to anchor her research to practice, she worked for two years as a social worker with asylum seekers and refugees with the Association Centro Astalli. Her research and publications focus on social work with asylum seekers and refugees, migration dynamics, ethnography, cultural sociology. She has conducted many studying and working experiences abroad. In 2018 Elena was a visiting research fellow at the University of the Western Cape (South Africa). In 2016 she took an internship in the Australian Population and Migration Research Center (University of Adelaide). She conducted her Master dissertation in the Third World Studies Center, in The Philippines, focusing internally displaced people due to environmental change. During her Masters, she spent one semester in the Metropolitan University of Prague, where she took part in the research project “Current Migration to Europe: Research of Smart Population Dynamics”. In 2014, she was a Bachelor exchange student at the University of Melbourne.