Prof. Dr. Bilgin Ayata is the project leader of the Elastic Borders research project. She joined the Centre for Southeast European Studies at Graz University in October 2020. Previously she was professor for political sociology at the University of Basel. She obtained her PhD at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA) and her MA degree from York University (Toronto, Canada). Her teaching and research centers on socio-political transformations with a focus on migration, borders, citizenship, affect and emotions, and postcolonial studies. Her regional expertise includes Europe and the MENA region. She has published widely on displacement, citizenship, transnationalism, affective politics, memory and violence.

Prof. Dr. Ayata has received numerous distinctive awards and grants. In Summer 2022, she was nominated for  research award by the Nomis Foundation to carry out a comprehensive study on the transformation of contemporary borders with a focus on the external frontiers of the European Union. Launched in November 2022, her research project “Elastic Borders” (2022-2026) builds on insights of earlier research projects that she recently directed, such as “Infrastructure space and the future of Migration Management: The EU Hotspots in the Mediterranean Borderscape”  (2018-2021), which was funded by the Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS) and  “Affective Citizenship: Religion, Migration and Belonging in Europe”  (2018-2022), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She was a DFG- Mercator Fellow (2019-2023) within  the CRC 1171 “Affective Societies” at the Freie Universität Berlin, where Prof. Dr. Ayata has been an international collaboration partner since 2015. She has received further awards and grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung, University of Basel, FU Berlin, Johns Hopkins University and York University.

Click here for more information and her list of publications.