Anissa Maâ, PhD in Political and Social Sciences (ULB) and F.R.S.-FNRS Research Fellow at the Université libre de Bruxelles, has published Signer la déportation. Migrations africaines et retours volontaires depuis le Maroc (Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2024). Based on her doctoral dissertation, this book analyzes voluntary return programmes run by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) through the lens of sociology and anthropology. Building on the ethnographic study conducted in Morocco among African migrants and the people who assist them on a daily basis, Anissa Maâ shows that voluntary returns are shaped at the intersection of border violence, local intermediation practices and the agency of migrants who, in their own words, “sign their deportation”. The book reveals the full complexity of a migration control tool that is all too often reduced to a hidden form of expulsion, or promoted as the only possible alternative in times of closing of borders.

In 2022-2023 Anissa Maâ was a Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of International Development, University of Oxford, where she worked with Professors Ruben Andersson and Loren Landau. Her research project was titled “Indigenous migration control? The role of return migrants in the implementation of migration control in West Africa”. Specialising in international migration management in Africa and in the dynamics of local intermediation in the context of international interventions, she is the author of several  articles (see her personal page on the ULB website and her ORCID profile).

Between October 2020 and April 2021, Ârash Aminian Tabrizi conducted seven interviews with late French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021), relating to questions of gender, sexual difference and sexualities.

Published under the title Sexpositions (les presses du reel, 2024) and illustrated by visual artist Léa Falguère, these conversations enable not only a rereading of Jean-Luc Nancy’s corpus and its developments through the prism of what Nancy has called sexistence, but also the reinscription of the elaboration of this concept in a web of biographical elements and, hence, an exploration of the philosopher’s actual sexistence.

Ârash Aminian Tabrizi (PhD candidate in Comparative Literaure at New York University) was granted a Wiener-Anspach fellowship in 2013 to complete an an MSt in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the early writings and publications of Jean-Paul Sartre, on the writing of sex and the sexes, the reception of German philosophy in France, the limits of aesthetics and the arts, and the history of contingency in French thought from the Revolution to the present day.

Justine Feyereisen, PhD in Letters, Translation and Communication (ULB) and French and Francophone Literature (University of Grenoble), is  the author of Renouer avec la terre extatique. Essai de sensopoétique chez J.M.G. Le Clézio (Classiques Garnier, 2024), an essay that aims to establish a new critical field at the nexus of text linguistics and philosophy, reviving the incantatory power of literature through a poetics of the senses – a sensopoetics – in the intermedial work of J.M.G. Le Clézio.

From 2019 until 2021, Dr Feyereisen was a Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxord, where she carried out a research project titled “Poetics of Cosmopolitical Utopias: Challenging Borders with Literature”, under the supervision of Prof. Matthew Reynolds (Faculty of English). In 2023 Prof. Reynolds was invited to deliver a Philippe Wiener Lecture at ULB, titled “Prismatic translation” (video).

Dr Feyereisen is currently FWO Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Gent University, where she is studying how postcolonial literatures rethink habitability in the face of migratory movements and climate change, and thus how “concrete utopia”, as a concept borrowed from Ernst Bloch, is redefined in the 21st century from former colonies in the face of these global challenges (more information about her research and publications is available here).