Our team

Dr Kate Botterill (Principal Investigator)

Kate Botterill is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Her research is concerned with the political geography of migration, citizenship and security, especially how young people are implicated in this. She has published papers that discuss how the geopolitics of migration connects to young people’s everyday lives, shaping intercultural practices of citizenship and community. Much of her work employs feminist, participatory approaches that focus on the emotional and psycho-social realm of politics, whist also interrogating structural and discursive violences that alienate and securitise communities. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and Higher Education Academy, a committee member of the RGS-IBG Population Geography Research Group, and participates on the steering group of the Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network (GramNet).
Daniela Sime

Professor Daniela Sime (Co-Investigator)

Daniela Sime is Co-Investigator on the MigYouth project. She is Professor of Youth, Migration and Social Justice in the School of Social Work & Social Policy at the University of Strathclyde. Daniela's research interests include young people's rights and participation, tackling social inequalities, migration policies and migrants'  rights and the inclusion of traditionally marginalised groups. She has led several research projects involving young people and their families, with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, British Academy, Save the Children and the Scottish Government. Currently, she is involved in two other UKRI-funded projects : Gen-Migra examines the impact of Covid-19 on migrant women and their families in four countries (UK, Brazil, Poland and Germany) and Men-Minds engages young men in Scotland, including migrants, in co-producing inclusive approaches for better mental health. 

Dr David McCollum (Co-Investigator)

After graduating with a First Class BSc (Hons) in Geography from the University of Dundee in 2004, Dr David McCollum worked as a researcher on an ESRC/Scottish Executive project on Demographic Trends in Scotland. Following this he undertook an MSc in Applied Population Geography at the University of Dundee, graduating with Distinction in 2006. After this he undertook an ESRC funded PhD entitled: Revolving doors, (un)sustainable employment and multiple work-welfare transitions, graduating in 2010 as well as an ESRC funded Internship with the Office of the Chief Researchers in the Scottish Government. He then worked on research projects for the ESRC Centre for Population Change (labour market aspects of East-Central European migration to the UK), the UK Government Office for Science (environmental mobility) and the Centre for Housing Research at the University of St Andrews (intergenerational justice and family welfare). He has been lecturing in Geography at the University of St Andrews since September 2012.

Bozena Sojka

Dr Bozena Sojka (Research Associate)

I joined the School of Geographical & Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow in August 2022 where I explore EU-born young people's (aged 16-26) experiences of education, work and training.

Previously I was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Community Research and Development (ICRD) at the University of Wolverhampton. I was awarded a B.A. and M.A. in Human Geography as well as MSc in Physical Geography by the Jan Kochanowski University (JKU) in Poland; following this, I obtained an MRes in Social Research Methods from the University of Aberdeen and a Ph.D. degree in Human Geography from Swansea University.

I have nearly 10 years' experience of undertaking research on social policy, welfare states, international migration and governance analysis as a new approach to the interpretation of public policy in a wide range of institutional settings in the UK, Poland, the Republic of Cyprus, India, Nepal and Somaliland. 

Also, I have a breadth of experience working with a wide range of stakeholders and am driven by the desire to ensure that the research which I conduct has impact. Therefore, I pay particular attention to communicating research findings to both academic and non-academic audiences.

 Previously I have worked as a Research Associate at the Department of Social & Policy Sciences at the University of Bath where I took part in the NORFACE project entitled: "Mobile Welfare in a Transnational Europe: An Analysis of Portability Regimes of Social Security Rights" (TRANSWEL). In this project I explored how portability regulations incorporate gendered, ethnicized/nationalized, age-related, class-related and other discourses of belonging and mapped the experiences of inequality resulting from possible limitations to the portability of social security rights.