Kiros Sereke Wegahtabrhan

Dr. Wegahta B. Sereke is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). After studying International Dispute Settlement (LL.M.) at MIDS, Geneva, and International Law (Master) at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, she earned her PhD in Philosophy of Communication Sciences from USI. Her research is situated at the intersection of migration studies and critical intercultural communication. She examines migration and integration with a focus on how cultural, racial, and ethnic differences are produced and negotiated in the practices of everyday life. Her work advances a critical intercultural communication perspective by analysing how power, inequality, and belonging are shaped through discourse, practices of everyday life, and t emotions and their regulation. She is particularly interested in how migrantised subjects as active agents negotiate inclusions and exclusions through practices of everyday life, verbal resistance to racism, and emotions and their regulation under conditions of structural inequality. Her work contributes to debates that conceptualise integration as a relational and contested process shaped by unequal power relations. A further strand of her research focuses on how imaginaries and hierarchies of citizenship are produced and reproduced in naturalisation procedures, engaging with contemporary political and legal debates in Switzerland and beyond. She is also interested in reflexivity in knowledge production, including questions of positionality and the role of lived experience in migration research. She is currently the project manager of the SNSF Agora–funded project Fostering Inclusion of Refugees: Storytelling and Dialogue at USI. The project uses participatory digital storytelling to communicate research findings to wider publics and to promote dialogue and public awareness about the everyday challenges refugees face.