The jurors of the 2021 Thesis Award
Kristine Racina is the director of the Expatriate Archive Centre. Originally from Latvia, she is a self-described ‘military brat’ and has experience as an adult expatriate in Yemen, the Netherlands Antilles and the Netherlands. Kristine is an experienced consultant and manager of projects and teams in government roles in Latvia and Yemen, and a number of NGOs and local organisations in the Netherlands. She speaks multiple languages, including English, Latvian, Russian, Dutch and French. Kristine has managed a number of projects and events with significant budgets and stakeholders in each of the countries she has lived. She has two Master’s degrees in Economics from University of Latvia and Financial Management from Centre Européen Universitaire de Nancy.
Matthew Hayes is an Associate Professor at St. Thomas University and has been with the department of sociology since 2009. His PhD dissertation (York University 2008) looked at how certain ideas and values helped shape the technical organization of the economy in the 20th century, particularly through macroeconomics. A few weeks after his dissertation defense, the stock market collapsed, and the so-called ‘Great Recession’ began. During this time, he became increasingly interested in how the relatively secure middle class in North America was being exposed to new and deeper forms of financial stress, and how cultural values and objective economic conditions increasingly diverged on issues such as labour, economic security, and urban and household forms. He is currently working on connecting this ethnographic work to broader theoretical reflections on the geographies of inequality in an individualist, market-oriented, post-welfare-state world.
Meghann Ormond is an Associate Professor in Cultural Geography at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. As a cultural geographer, an immigrant who has lived all over the world, and an ardent fan of the transformative potential of international travel, she’s deeply invested in and concerned with how differently-mobile people’s roots, rights and vulnerabilities are recognised and accommodated in the places they visit and in which they live.
Sarah Kunz is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol in the UK. She obtained her PhD in Human Geography from University College London and previously studied Sociology in the UK, the Netherlands, and the US. Her research focuses on privileged forms of mobility and migration, the politics of migration categories and belonging, the relationship between mobility, coloniality and racism, and the role of elites and their intermediaries. At present, she is writing a book on the postcolonial history and politics of the category expatriate, to be published with Manchester University Press in 2022, and is conducting research into investment migration programmes in the UK, Europe and the Caribbean.
Danau Tanu: an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda University, Japan. Being of mixed-heritage and having grown up internationally, her passion is to uncover the hidden voices of the children of serial migrants and others who grow up in the liminal space of the third culture. Her doctoral dissertation has become the first book on structural racism in international schools, Growing Up in Transit: The Politics of Belonging at an International School. Danau likes to claim that she speaks ‘3.5’ languages (English, Japanese, Indonesian and Chinese), and volunteers as Co-Chair of the Families in Global Transition (FIGT) Research Network. She is also a co-founder of the TCKs of Asia online forum and the Third Culture Stories podcast.