Name: Jaafar Alloul
Nationality: Belgium
Graduation Year: 2014 (Cohort 2)
Mobility Path: Ahfad University Khartoum, Sudan; Slovenian Migration Center Ljubljana, Slovenia
Current Job: Joint Researcher at the 'Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research' (AISSR), University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the ‘Interculturalism, Migration & Minorities Research Center’ (IMMRC), KU Leuven University, Belgium.
Jaafar's story:
One day you‘re involved in action research on asylum seekers’ basic rights in Lower Saxony, Germany, the other day you‘re reflecting on the daily lives of skilled migrants in Norway‘s outback; then you find yourself sitting on the Blue Nile river bank in Khartoum, discussing your local encounters with an Ecuadorian peer after a (47,9 degree Celsius) day of lectures on gender at a women‘s university in Sudan; yet another day you are spending the afternoon with kids in a Roma day-care center in Slovenia. How does one describe a program that provides you with such a diversity of hands-on experiences in offbeat environments whilst consistently performing at high academic standards? One word: phenomenal! Beware, intellectually inspiring but emotionally challenging; a great life experience that enriches you and makes you reinvent yourself and the worlds you inhabit.
EMMIR is a fascinating interdisciplinary program in migration studies that prepares students for both scientific research as well as pursuing careers outside of academia. After the graduation, I pursued a PhD for which I focused on the emigration motives and trajectories of tertiary-educated EU citizens with a minority background, moving from Western Europe to the Arab Gulf city of Dubai, all of which enabled me to enquire the nexus of geographical and social mobility, as well as its intersections with the world of global labor and the travelling hierarchies of race.
EMMIR provides students with fundamental insights into migration policy and human mobility. One of the great advantages of this two-year program draws from the fact that it is set up around a module-based approach in various countries, allowing you from a very early stage to focus on your own research interests and foci. Another unique element derives from the program’s ‘Erasmus Mundus’ label of excellence, ensuring candidates that they will study in a relatively small group of people from all over the world. Hence, with EMMIR, diversity becomes an everyday experience over the course of an intellectual and cultural journey, the result of which is a lasting sense of cohort-community along with a strong professional network around the globe.
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