After its first year of work, the Dinobord team has expanded. We are very happy to announce that after rigorous scrutiny of applications, we have hired Vasileios Vlassis as a postdoc researcher at IT University, Denmark, to be part of the project from May 1, 2023. Thanks to the co-financing of the Department of Business IT at ITU, Vasilis was granted a three-years assistant professorship position, which will allow him to both teach at the Department and engage with Dinobord for three years.
Vasilis has conducted research around bordering, policing, surveillance, and the digitalization of the state. For his PhD thesis, he investigated border guards’ practices and the registration of “irregular” migrants crossing to the European Union through the maritime Greek-Turkish borders. As part of the Velux funded project, “Welfare after Digitalization” he has also conducted research on the Danish Police’s use of data integration platforms and their shift toward Intelligence Led Policing.
In Dinobord, Vasilis is mainly working with fieldwork on surveillance practices at Danish border sites as well as collaborate with our Norwegian team for fieldwork at Norwegian borders. He also supports the project administratively by coordinating meetings and updating this website.
We are also thankful for the work that our research assistant Luna Rasmussen conducted in the first year of the project. Her contributions in the collection of documents in our mapping phase were very valuable to kick-off the project and our collaborations, see for example two of the initial article ideas that we have presented at the Nordic STS conference (insert link to the post) and we are working on to develop (link to the project meeting in Gothenburg). Luna has also designed this very website and will coach us forward in our updates.
From the Fall 2023, Luna will work as a doctoral student at the Department of Business IT and will continue being affiliated to Dinobord.