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Anissa Maâ holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and is currently a Wiener-Anspach Foundation Affiliated Research Fellow at Oxford Department of International Development. She carries out research at the intersection of international politics and socio-anthropology of migrations, drawing on ethnographic fieldworks conducted in North and West Africa (Morocco, Mali).
In her PhD thesis, Dr Maâ studied the implementation of voluntary return programmes of the International Organisation for Migrations (IOM) from Morocco, focusing on the practices of local intermediaries and migrants. She developed the concept of “indigenous intermediation” to explore the ambiguous role of migrant intermediaries in the return of their peers and the colonial legacies of intermediation in the control of mobilities in Africa. Her current postdoctoral research draws on fieldwork conducted in Mali, and interrogates the intermediation of migration control and the articulations between different regimes of im/mobility (local actors, expatriates, migrants) in the context of armed conflict.
Anissa Maâ is the author of several articles published in international peer-reviewed journals (see her ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2286-9212). An academic book based on her thesis is to be published in 2023 at Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles (“Signer la deportation”. Migrations africaines et retours volontaires depuis le Maroc).
Research project at ODID
During her research stay at ODID, Dr Maâ will be working under the supervision of Professors Ruben Andersson and Loren Landau. She will further develop her research perspective on autonomy and control, intermediation and outsourcing, as well as mobility and migration control in war times.
