Bio

Sevda Tunaboylu is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Researcher jointly hosted by the University of Barcelona and McGill University. Her current research is part of T-PROTECT, a Horizon Europe funded project (2025–2028) that investigates how temporary protection regimes shape the lives of third country nationals as well as its alternatives across diverse political contexts, including the United States, Mexico, South Africa, and the European Union. Her work combines ethnography, policy analysis, and comparative field research to better understand the governance of migration and conditions of legal precarity. Sevda is also a research member of the project “Migration and families: bridges between generations, case studies on the Mexican borders”, led by Dr Arianna Re at Universidad Autónoma de Campeche. 

Alongside her academic research, Sevda is the co-founder of SOMA Association, a migrant women–led nonprofit organisation dedicated to advancing wellbeing, empowerment, and social inclusion. Through sports, educational programmes, community events, and individual mentoring, SOMA works to create supportive and accessible spaces for migrant women navigating life in new environments. This work continually informs Sevda's research, grounding her academic questions in lived realities.

Her broader research agenda also includes studies of return, detention, and deportation systems, and the human rights implications of these policies. She is part of the Horizon Europe project MORE (Motivations, Experiences, and Consequences of Return and Readmission Policies) coordinated by University of Barcelona (2023-2026), which critically examines the effects of return policy and its implementation and seeks to identify more humane, realistic and sustainable policy alternatives such as regularisation.

Before her current fellowship, Sevda held a prestigious Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Fellowship (2023-2025) in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona. She has undertaken visiting research appointments at leading migration research centres, including COMPAS, University of Oxford (2024), MiReKoc, Koç University (2020), and Maastricht University (2019). She earned her PhD in Political and Social Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University (2021), where she also completed her Master’s in Migration Studies (2017). She holds an MSc in Social Development Practice from University College London (2016) and a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University (2013).

Sevda is actively engaged in several academic networks, including the European Social Research Unit (ESRU) and the Centre for Gender, Identity and Diversity (GENI) at the University of Barcelona, as well as the Council for European Studies (CES), the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), and IMISCOE. She is also a founding member of Network of Intergenerational Studies of Migrant Families in Mexico (REIFMM). 

She regularly serves as a reviewer for high-impact journals, such as Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, International Migration, and Social Sciences, and evaluates proposals for major funding bodies, including the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF). She also contributes to academic selection committees, most recently for the IMISCOE Spring Conference 2025, themed “The Regularity of Irregularity: Rethinking Migration Paradigms.”