About me

Ricard Zapata-Barrero is a leading migration studies scholar, specializing in migration governance, citizenship, and diversity. In the last few years, Ricard has been particularly engaged in the normative debate on interculturalism. He is also promoting the development of migration studies in the Mediterranean region, and deepening the research on Urban Migration Governance. Regarding the latter, he has contributed to framing the "local turn" in migration studies and this track of research from urban politics. Currently he is theorizing urban resilience and urban migration governance.

His fields of interest within migration studies include: 

Borders and Human Mobility: Transnational Diaspora and Entrepreneurship; Externalization of EU migration policies; Intra-EU mobility and EU citizenship; Ethics of migration and human security.

Diversity and Citizenship: Intercultural citizenship; Cultural Policies; Multiple and intersectional diversity; Political Parties; Multi-level governance; Urban Governance; Policy narratives and Xenophobic political discourses.

Methodology in Migration Studies: Qualitative and Conceptual Research, Research Ethics.

To learn more about Ricard Zapata-Barrero and his work, kindly visit his Google Scholar profile and Wikipedia.

 

Early life

A son of a political refugee under the Francoist regime, Ricard was born in November 1965 in Sabadell (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain). At the age of seven, together with his mother and two sisters, he crossed The Portbou border with a family false passport and spent his childhood in Paris (France). Once there, he helped to organize the Spanish diaspora, learnt from his father political activities against the francoist regime and followed critically the democratic transition. In 1984, he returned to Spain to study philosophy at the Barcelona Autonomous University. In 1989, he studied in Paris at Ecole des Hautes Etudes, where he obtained a Diplôme d'études Approfondies (DEA), and followed seminars from P. Bourdieu, A. Boudon and Luc Boltanski. His research was on bureaucracy and the Max Weber methodology. 

Afterwards, he went to the University of Caen (with Luc Ferry and A. Renaut) and the University of Leeds (with D. Beetham). He then spent the next year at the Universities of Political Science in Berlin and Munich. And he was at Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science (OSI) of the Freie Universitat Berlin. In 1996, Ricard completed his Ph.D. at the Barcelona Autonomous University with a research entitled Ciudadanía, Democracia, y Pluralismo Cultural: Hacia un Nuevo Contrato Social (Citizenship, Democracy, and Cultural Pluralism: towards a new social contract), published by Editorial Anthropos in 2001.