Keynote speakers  

Lecturer, Dr Maria Pisani, B.A.(Melit.), M.A.(Melit.), Ph.D.(Melit.), Youth & Community Studies, Faculty for Social Wellbeing, University of Malta. Pisani has specialized in forced migration with a special focus on gendered migration; critical pedagogy; youth political mobilization and social transformation. She is interested in exploring the citizenship assumption within Western epistemologies as well as social injustice and the intersectionality of inter alia race/ethnicity, gender, age, legal status, disability. Pisani is also a practitioner and an activist whose ongoing involvement in the field provides an opportunity to keep the dialectic relationship between theory and practice alive.

Professor Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is professor of comparative film and culture in the School of Humanities and Languages, and Distinguished Professor at the iCinema Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research interests cut across cinema, China, urban cultures, China/Europe/Australia comparative studies, and childhood. Currently Professor Hemelryk Donald focuses on migrant and mobile children in postwar film, analyzing how childhood has been valued in key societies since 1945, as an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Her key note lecture is linked to the Dorothy project: Migration and Mobility: the question of childhood in Chinese and European cinema since 1945’. Recent articles have been published in New Formations, Affirmations of the Modern, and Theory Culture and Society. Forthcoming books include: Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema: Borders and Encounters since 1980 (Bloomsbury 2017). and There's No Place Like Home: Child Migrants in World Cinema (IB Tauris, 2017).

Prof. Fadma Aït Mous (PhD in political science), Faculté Des Lettres Et Des Sciences Humaines De Ain Chock à Casablanca & Centre de Recherche Economie Société Culture (CRESC)/EGE Rabat. Fadma Aït Mous has specialized in the emergence of Moroccan nationalism from local to national networks, with a special focus on issues related to youth social movements, socio-political transformations, citizenship and migration. She collaborates with the Finnish Youth Research Network as a partner in the on-going EU-funded SAHWA Project: Researching Arab Mediterranean Youth: Towards a New Social Contract, which brings together 15 partners from Europe and Arab Mediterranean countries.

Henri Onodera (PhD in Development Studies), postdoctoral researcher, Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki. Onodera has studied youth activism in Egypt before the 2011 revolution, focusing on the role of political action in the context of young Cairene’s everyday lives. He is a member of Youth and political engagement in contemporary Africa (YoPo), a joint research project of the University of Helsinki and the Finnish Youth Research Network (2012-2016). His current research interests include youth experiences of prolonged adolescence in the Middle East and North Africa, and young asylum seekers’ everyday life in Finland.