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Biography

 

Mengia Tschalaer holds a PhD in legal anthropology and an MA in International Law and social anthropology – both from University of Zurich, Switzerland. She has over 19 years of interdisciplinary qualitative research experience with hard-to-reach groups (i.e. tribal women, LGBTQI+ persons seeking asylum), including 30 months of fieldwork in India and Germany. In 2018, Mengia won the prestigious European Union–funded Marie-Curie Fellowship, which was hosted by the School for Politics, Sociology, and International Studies at University of Bristol. In her role as a Marie-Curie research fellow, Mengia led a qualitative socio-legal research project that examined the experiences of Muslim LGBTQI+ refugees within Germany’s asylum system. This project led to the creation of the Queer European Asylum Network, an umbrella organization that centers the voices of LGBTQI+ asylum claimants, refugees, and activists in policy discussions on queer migration and asylum in Europe. Between 2020 and 2023, Mengia was a Research Fellow at Brunel Law School on the ITFLOWS project, a large EU-funded initiative designed to provide migration flow predictions in the European Union. At ITFLOWS, Mengia coordinated the policy work on migration flow predictions and human rights and contributed to various project reports on migration, asylum, human rights, and migration prediction technology, including Artificial Intelligence. 

 

Mengia Tschalaer has taught undergraduate courses on law and society, transnational feminisms, and intersectionality at Columbia University and City University of New York. She was a Visiting Scholar and a Research Fellow at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, Columbia Law School. Her research received support from the Swiss National Science Foundation, University of Zurich, City University of New York,the European Commission and the Heinrich Böll Foundation.