IAMCR Webinar "Migration, Technology, and Human Rights"

Gustavo Dias is Professor and Researcher with the Graduate Program in History and with the Graduate Program in Society, Environment, and Territory at the State University of Montes Claros, Brazil, and also coordinator of the Odyssey: Abdelmalek Sayad Research Group, registered at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development. He completed his PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths / University of London, United Kingdom. His research is concerned with Brazilian international migration and with Abdelmalek Sayad’s critical perspectives on migration.

Jessica Retis is the director of the Master’s in Bilingual Journalism at the University of Arizona, where she also served as the director of the School of Journalism until June 2025. Her academic work is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach to migrations, contemporary diasporas, and media. She has researched the history and recent development of Latin American migrations in various regions around the world, including Europe (Spain, the United Kingdom, France), North America (the United States), Asia (Japan), and Latin America (Brazil and Peru). Additionally, she has studied fields related to journalism, the teaching of bilingual journalism, and communication for social change. She has twenty years of experience as a journalist in Peru, Mexico, and Spain, and over thirty years as an educator in academic institutions across Latin America, North America, and Europe. In 2021, she was honored as a CUES Distinguished Fellow for her research on bilingual journalism education in the United States. In 2025, she received the AEJMC Barrow Award for Distinguished Achievement in Diversity Research and Education, recognizing her academic leadership and commitment to diversity in higher education. Between 2021 and 2023, she served as an Academic Officer At-Large for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ). She is currently a member of the International Relations Commission of the Spanish Association of Communication Research (AE-IC).

Koen Leurs is an Associate Professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His research interests are migration, borders, youth culture and digital technologies, co-creative methodologies and ethics. Currently, Leurs is part of the Management Committee of the Cost-Action DATA-MIG CA22135 - Data Matters: Sociotechnical Challenges of European Migration and Border Control. Recently, Leurs was the PI of the Team Science project Co-designing a fair digital asylum procedure, funded by the Digital Society (‘DiSa’) programme, Universities of the Netherlands and COMMIT/, a public-private ICT research community. He recently co-edited Doing Digital Migration Studies (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) and the Handbook of Media and Migration (Sage, 2020) and published the monograph Digital Migration (Sage, 2023).

Sara Marino is a Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media and co-founder of the Digital Culture and Economies Research Hub at London College of Communication (University of the Arts London). As a digital ethnographer and digital migration scholar, her research has over the years focused on the relationship between digital media, transnational spaces and migrant identities. She is particularly interested in the social, cultural, and political implications of everyday practices of connectivity among European and non-European migrants, and how technologies shape transnational practices of solidarity within migrant communities. Current projects include an ongoing study on the principles of ethical coding and mindful data filtering as alternatives to the current forms of data collection implemented by political and humanitarian organizations within contexts of crisis, and an ethnographic study of the material and affective uses of Tik Tok use among young Ukrainian refugees in the aftermath of the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine.