Jenna Mazza is a Fulbright U.S. Predoctoral Researcher at GRITIM-UPF. Her research, supervised by Dr. Dirk Gebhardt, explores the effectiveness of Barcelona’s city-level refugee policies, as Barcelona was the first city to challenge the gaps in national Spanish asylum policy by creating its “Refuge City” plan and has led municipal refugee response across Spain and Europe. Her research focuses on analyzing local policies directly through the personal experiences of refugees and asylum seekers. She compares this to policy motivations in order to understand the dynamics affecting inclusion, exclusion, and mobility in Barcelona as well as the individual impact of Barcelona's policies on asylum seekers' abilities to adapt and thrive in their host country. This project will also investigate how and why mayor cities position themselves against the anti-immigrant and anti-refugee backlash, of which Barcelona is a strong case study, in order to understand the drivers of city-level protagonism in Barcelona and other cities.