Talia Baroncelli, M.A., LL.M

Talia Baroncelli is a doctoral candidate in Law and Politics at the University of Graz and a new research assistant at the Centre for Southeast European Studies, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Bilgin Ayata. She is currently conducting research as part of the project “Elastic Borders: Rethinking the Borders of the 21st Century.” Her research interests include European migration policy, as well as the erosion of the right to asylum and the surveillance of asylum-seekers at the EU's external borders. She is particularly interested in the jurisdictional grey area that encompasses the joint operations between EU Member States, EU agencies such as Frontex, international organizations, as well as profit-driven private actors, and the human rights violations which are perpetrated without accountability as a result of this legal confusion. She completed an LL.M in European Business and Social Law at the University of Bocconi in Milan, in addition to an M.A. in Political Science at Freie Universität in Berlin. Prior to her relocation to Europe, she completed her Honours B.A. in Political Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. She spent several years between 2016 – 2020 working as a legal counsellor at a Berlin-based NGO, Kontakt-und Beratungsstelle (KuB), where she primarily worked with asylum-seekers from Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, and the Western Balkans. Her hands-on experience from the NGO prompted her to undertake a PhD in EU migration issues, to further interrogate the contradictions in EU policy and the violence perpetrated at and beyond the EU’s periphery.