Research and Projects
Elena’s internationally-recognised research explores migration, displacement, refuge and inequality across diverse global contexts. Working across disciplines and regions, she examines how people navigate and respond to systems of exclusion, marginalisation, care, and responsibility in contexts shaped by mobility, conflict, and structural inequality. Her innovative and widely-cited work examines how knowledge and narratives about displacement are produced; whose experiences become visible; who is recognised as a producer of knowledge; and how alternative forms of storytelling can challenge dominant understandings of refugees, humanitarianism, and social justice.
Over the past two decades, Elena’s work has reshaped how displacement and refuge are understood in academic, policy, and public debates. Through interdisciplinary research, international collaboration, and creative and participatory methodologies, she has developed new conceptual frameworks for understanding refugee-refugee and refugee-host relations, overlapping displacement, South-South humanitarianism, religion and displacement, and the politics and practices of refuge and sanctuary.
Alongside leading major international research programmes, Elena has established research networks, edited field-defining handbooks and journals, developed long-term collaborations across the Middle East, Europe, North America, and beyond, and worked with governments, humanitarian organisations, cultural institutions, and universities to bring research into dialogue with policy, practice, education, and the arts.
Refugee Hosts and Local Communities of Refuge
Rethinking refugee response through relationality, refuge, and everyday practices of support
The Refugee Hosts programme - funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council - challenges conventional distinctions between “refugees” and “hosts” by examining how people who have themselves experienced displacement frequently provide support, care, hospitality and refuge to others. Research across Lebanon, Jordan, Türkiye, Germany and the United Kingdom has explored refugee-refugee relations, overlapping displacement and the everyday practices through which refuge is created and negotiated.
Working with refugees, local communities, faith actors, poets, artists and community researchers, the programme approaches hosting as a relational practice rather than a fixed humanitarian category. In so doing, it opens wider questions about responsibility, care, belonging and who is recognised as a responder to displacement. A complementary project funded by the British Council-USA brought the Refugee Hosts project into conversation with colleagues from Yale University, developing an innovative cross-regional initiative including cases from the Middle East, Central America, West Africa, Europe and South East Asia.
Southern Responses to Displacement
Reimagining humanitarianism from the perspectives of refugees and the Global South
Through her leadership of the Southern Responses to Displacement programme - funded by the European Research Council -, Elena examines how refugees, communities, civil society organisations, faith actors and states across the Global South respond to displacement through solidarity, protection, advocacy, education and care.
Placing refugees’ perspectives alongside wider Southern-led responses, this research asks how humanitarianism, responsibility and protection look when approached beyond dominant frameworks. It examines both the possibilities and inequalities within South-South responses while contributing to wider debates about more equitable forms of humanitarian action and representation. Building on Elena’s work as External Convenor of Dartmouth College’s South-South Forum, Southern Responses to Displacement has also worked in collaboration with colleagues from across the Middle East, North America and South East Asia.
Refuge in a Moving World
Rethinking refuge in an interconnected and unequal world
Founded by Elena as part of UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies, Refuge in a Moving World is an interdisciplinary initiative exploring how refuge is imagined, experienced, negotiated and created across diverse contexts. It approaches refuge as more than a legal or humanitarian category, through exploring refuge as a social, political, ethical and creative practice.
Through research, publications, exhibitions, teaching and international collaboration, the initiative brings researchers into conversation with artists, educators, policymakers and community partners to explore displacement, belonging and the possibilities of refuge.
Explore Refuge in a Moving World →
Research Themes and Approaches
Across and beyond these programmes, Elena’s research develops a series of interconnected questions about displacement, inequality, responsibility and knowledge. These themes connect long-standing areas of scholarship with newer work on humanitarian futures, sanctuary, representation and the politics of knowledge.
Gender, Generation, Care and Inequality
Examines how displacement is shaped by gender, generation, family, care and intersecting inequalities. Across research with refugees and migrants in different contexts, this work explores how relationships of age, gender, religion, class and legal status shape people’s opportunities, responsibilities and capacities to act, while bringing questions of care and interdependence into wider understandings of displacement.
Religion, Humanitarianism and Social Justice
Explores how religion, faith-based actors and ethical traditions shape displacement, humanitarian response, social support and belonging. Elena’s work has examined faith-based humanitarianism across camps and cities and contributed to wider interdisciplinary debates about religion, migration, protection and social justice.
Refuge, Hospitality and Belonging
Explores how refuge is created, contested and sustained through relationships of hospitality, solidarity and coexistence. Moving beyond legal categories of refugeehood and asylum, this work examines the social and ethical practices through which people create refuge for one another, particularly in contexts marked by overlapping displacement and inequality.
Accountability, Localisation and Humanitarian Futures
Examines how humanitarian systems can become more accountable, equitable and responsive to affected communities. Current work explores localisation and local leadership, protection and access, participation, humanitarian standards, accountability and the distribution of authority within humanitarian systems, with particular attention to whose knowledge shapes priorities and who has the power to make decisions.
Education, Sanctuary and Inclusion
Explores how universities and other educational institutions respond to displacement, conflict and inequality. Connecting research with institutional practice, this work examines educational access, sanctuary, international partnership and inclusive approaches to teaching and learning, alongside the wider responsibilities of universities towards students and scholars affected by displacement.
Storytelling, Narrative and Representation
Examines how stories, images and other forms of representation shape understandings of displacement, refuge and humanitarian crises: who tells these stories, whose experiences become visible, which narratives circulate, and which remain unheard. Across work involving poetry, photography, oral history and digital and public narratives, Elena explores how representation can reproduce inequality but also challenge established ways of seeing and knowing displacement.
At the centre of this work is a concern with narrative and epistemic justice: holding space for people affected by displacement to tell their stories, and recognising their roles in shaping the concepts and forms of knowledge through which displacement itself is understood.
Creative and Participatory Research
A distinctive and innovative strand of Elena’s work develops collaborative and participatory approaches to knowledge production. Working with people with refugee backgrounds, community researchers, artists, writers, photographers and educators, she explores methods that challenge conventional distinctions between researcher and researched and recognise different forms of expertise.
Her research has used photography, poetry, oral history, exhibitions, community research and collaborative publication both to communicate research findings, and as methods of inquiry, interpretation and knowledge production.