Workshop with Widening Europe Programme short-term mobility visitors

• Development and External Relations Service
• Widening Europe Programme

Join a peer-to-peer discussion with EUI researchers and Widening short-term mobility visitors!

The EUI Widening Europe Programme continues in 2026 to enhance research opportunities, promote knowledge exchange, and facilitate access to resources in the social sciences and humanities by offering one-week mobility stays at the European University Institute for doctoral researchers from the targeted Widening countries.

During this workshop, the visitors will present their work in person as part of a group session with other participants in the short-term mobility staying at the EUI during the same week. EUI peers who have been paired with the visitors will act as discussants and provide comments and feedback during these sessions.

About the visitors:

• Ayoub Albahri is a PhD researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland. His research investigates how Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya use irregular transit migration of Sub-Saharan Africans to the EU as a foreign policy instrument. Combining mixed-methods fieldwork and interviews with government officials, it examines mechanisms of migration governance, border control, and securitization. The research highlights how these states instrumentalize migration flows to shape their EU policy and negotiation outcomes. Findings illuminate the political and security dimensions of migration, revealing power asymmetries, strategies of external governance, and implications for EU migration policy.
• Szilárd Bartok is a PhD researcher at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. His doctoral research project is tentatively titled Examining the interaction of gender, approval of political violence, authoritarian attitudes, and extremism. Political and social changes over the past decade have prompted renewed scholarly attention to examining the way in which misogyny fits into the larger ideological framework of various radical or extremist organisations and movements, with a specific interest in the far-right. As part of his doctoral research, he aims to examine this connection using quantitative data analytics, using pre-collected survey data, as well as possibly through qualitative interviews with followers and prominent members of organisations commonly described as far-right.
• Marta Keglević is a PhD researcher at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her doctoral research examines gender differences in migration aspirations among young people in rural Eastern Croatia, with a particular focus on the perception of the local environment, including attachment to place, sense of belonging, and perceived quality of life, with gender as the primary analytical framework. The project employs qualitative methodology and extensive fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews and focus groups, conducted across rural communities in five counties of Eastern Croatia.
• Frederica Mendonça is a PhD researcher at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. Her research interests centre around urbanism and public policy design in developing countries. The title of her project is Informal Labor for Public Service Delivery: ReCycling in Mozambique. Public service provision in low-income cities is often constrained by coordination failures between households, informal labour, and weak municipal capacity. This paper studies whether activating these margins jointly can improve last-mile service delivery.

This initiative reflects the EUI’s commitment to broadening participation in European academic life and ensuring that talented scholars from underrepresented countries can access opportunities to pursue advanced research training.

Members of the EUI community interested in joining the discussion are welcome to register for this event.