Timokleia Psallidaki is a member of the GAPs research team in Greece at the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE). She is a PhD candidate in Migration Studies and Human Geography at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Her research interests include migration, border transformations, practices of migrants’ settlement in the city, socio-spatial inequalities, European migration policies, mobility, and precarity. During my postgraduate studies in Urban and Regional Planning at NTUA, I engaged with critical geography perspectives that conceptualize space as a relational entity—one shaped by interconnections, multiplicity, and ongoing interactions between global and local dynamics. Perceiving space…
Read MoreIn the context of return migration from Greece, whether considered through the legal and institutional framework or the research on the ‘Return Migration Infrastructures’, the issue of regularity versus irregularity is inescapable. Irregularity has become a central concept in dominant public discourses about migration, often defined in opposition to regularity—or, more specifically, legality. By equating irregularity with illegality, this binary logic is used to stigmatize migrants as ‘threats’ to national and EU social and political structures. This oversimplification, however, neglects the complex ways in which irregularity is not simply a status but a process shaped by…
Read MoreIn April 2024, the Hellenic Data Protection Authority issued a fine of €175,000 to the Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum, due to non-compliance with data projection regulations concerning the…
Read MoreIn early September 2023, the research team of the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE) started fieldwork in Greece within the scope of the GAPs project (entitled “De-centring the Study of Migrant Returns and Readmission Policies in Europe and Beyond”), particularly focusing on Return Migration Infrastructures (RMIs). Research on RMIs aims to bring to the fore how return migration governance is put into practice…
Read MoreOn the 14th June 2023, the flagless vessel named “Adriana” sank off the coast of Pylos, in Southwestern Greece in an attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea and reach Italy. As Eastern Mediterranean sea routes are more tightly controlled, other, more dangerous routes…
Read MoreGAPs had its official kick-off meeting on 8-9 March 2023 with a public panel event on 10 March 2023, the agenda of which can be viewed here. The majority of the team members, members of our advisory board and our ethics…
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