Giacomo Orsini

Dr. Giacomo Orsini is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ghent University's Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy within the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences. He is affiliated with the Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR) where he coordinates the ChildMove and REFUFAM projects. Orsini also teaches migration-related courses at the Université Libre de Bruxelles since 2015.

Education:

• PhD in Sociology, University of Essex (2016)

Orsini's research concentrates on the coloniality of everyday migration governance and the multiplication of tangible and intangible borders of racist exclusion and inclusion. His work examines structural violence against unaccompanied minors, institutional racism within family reunification policies in Belgium, and European migration regimes. He employs qualitative fieldwork methodologies across multiple European border sites including Lampedusa, Gibraltar, and contested territories like Abkhazia and Transnistria.

His recent publications reveal a consistent focus on how bordering practices shape migration experiences, with particular attention to the intersection of migration governance, racism, and social welfare provision in contested spaces. Orsini's work bridges theoretical frameworks from governmentality studies, critical border studies, and postcolonial theory.

As a supervisor, Orsini guides doctoral research on bordering social welfare provision in contested territories, with current PhD candidates examining cases in Abkhazia, Transnistria, and Georgia. His research has secured funding including the Special Research Fund for the Geopolitics in Social Welfare project.

Orsini leads field investigations within CESSMIR's ChildMove project, focusing on unaccompanied minors' migration trajectories across Europe, and the REFUFAM project examining refugee family dynamics. His work frequently involves collaboration with civil society organizations operating in migration borderlands.