Dr Valentina Grillo is a social anthropologist researching on forced migration in different types of refugee settlements and camps. The analysis of migration has been at the core of her work in the field of academic research and legal advice in asylum law.
For her doctoral studies, after receiving the EFEO bourse de terrain, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Rohingya refugee women living in refugee camps in south-eastern Bangladesh. She focused on notions of social exclusion and survival strategies in the camps where rules shift continously. More specifically, she examined policies that made births in hospitals mandatory and their effect on the decision-making process on the place of birth in different camps and the birth itself. Dr Grillo has experience in conducting ethnographic and qualitative research in refugee camps about several topics, such as everyday life practices, politics and forced migration.
Prior to joining Loughborough University, she was Lecturer at the University of Vienna at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. She also acted as case-worker in the field of asylum law and international in Sicily, and provided for ARCI training courses on Bangladesh and Pakistan to social workers working in the field of asylum.
She is member of the EASA (European Association of Social Anthropology), the EUROSEAS (European Association of Southeast Asian Studies), the CASE (Centre Asie du Sud-Est) and the RRWG (Rohingya Research Working Group).
The role of freshwater connectivity in facilitating the range expansion of invertebrate invasive species.
As postdoctoral research associate at the GeoEx project, Dr Valentina Grillo’s research interests include:
- Refugee camps ethnography, anthropology of migration and refugee studies
- South Asia and Southeast Asia: geographies of knowledge or geographies of ignorance?
- Rohingya forced migration, its representation and history
- Biopolitics, power technologies and policies of containment among refugees in the geographical global South
- Boundaries, legal categories, emic categories, refuge and asylum
- Politics of reproduction, reproductive (in)justice, hospitalisation of births, certificates
- Childbirth practices, as well as other health practices’ reception in the context of refugee camps, host countries and humanitarian responses
- Embodiment, body practices and the materiality of birth
- Visual anthropology and its qualitative methods (including drawing, body mapping and photography)
- Birth practices and intersectionality
- 2025 Social Exclusion and Survival Strategies of Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh, in: N. Uddin (Editor), Reshaping Rohingya Futures: Coping Strategies and Emerging Agencies, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
- 2022 “BANGLA-STORIES: an Introduction to the Bangladeshi Community in Palermo through their Legal Experience of the Asylum Application”, in: Migration and Culture: Implementation of Cultural Rights of Migrants, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, available at: https://www.iriss.cnr.it/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Migration-and-Culture-Implementation-of-Cultural-Rights-of-Migrants-CNR-Edizioni-2021.pdf.
- 2020 Asylum Procedures Shortcomings in Tunisia: What do European Borders mean for the EU?, in: Monika Mokre, Christine Nölle-Karimi, Leonardo Schiocchet (Editors), Agency and Tutelage in Forced Migration, ROR-n Plattform 2(1), ROR-n.
- 2019 Border Perspectives on Migration Policies – Refugees in Tunisia, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing.
- 2018 Research Notes – Refugees In Tunisia: Border Perspectives On Migration Policies, in: Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia, 4(2) Special Issue – Anthropologists and Refugees between the Middle East and Europe.