Irene Portas Vázquez completed the research master program Cultural Anthropology: Sociocultural Transformation in Utrecht University (the Netherlands), submitting her thesis on the dynamics at play in the process of empowering Rohingya refugee women in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). Her research interests revolve around forced migration, survival strategies of displaced groups, immigration policies and practices, and nation-building processes. She is currently working as a doctoral researcher in the project “Remixing Industrial Pasts in the Digital Age: Sounds, Images, Ecologies, Practices and Materialities in Space and Time”. Her research examines the clandestine pathways of refugees, smugglers and miners in the Franco-Luxembourgish border throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Irene combines ethnographic and historical methods in order to shed light on underground realities often dismissed in conventional historiographical accounts.
She successfully defended her thesis in May 2024.