Fellow 2025-2026 Chioma Daisy Onyige
Chioma Daisy Onyige is a Professor of Criminology at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Her research areas include gender and crime, environmental sociology, gender and climate change, and cognate issues such as conflict and peacebuilding
Her research for the past ten years has been on migration, and also on contemporary slavery studies, specifically on human trafficking and smuggling of women and children from Africa to Europe. She has been a Fellow of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland; a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Centre (RCC) for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany; a Fellow of the African Science Leadership Programme (ASLP), University of Pretoria, South Africa; a Commonwealth Fellow of the University of Oxford, UK; an alumna of the Global Young Academy (GYA), German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, Germany; a Fellow, Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Law as Culture” Center for Advanced Studies, University of Bonn, Germany; and a Heinz Heinen Senior Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies,” University of Bonn, Germany. She has also been a Visiting Research Fellow of the Émile Durkheim Research Unit at the University of Bonn, Germany.
Her research has been funded by a wide range of research councils and foundations such as the Swiss National Science Foundation, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) National Research Fund (NRF), Nigeria, and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The focus of Daisy’s research is on the study of migration dynamics, particularly within the African diaspora en route to Europe. Her current project examines the intricate interplay of biopolitics in shaping the apocalyptic experiences endured by migrants on their journey from Africa to Europe. Grounded in a multidisciplinary approach drawing from political theory, sociology, and migration studies, this study seeks to uncover the underlying mechanisms through which biopolitical interventions construct, classify, and contest specific spatialities, temporalities, and affects within the migration process. Among her many publications are notable works on migration such as The Challenges, Complexities and Uncertainties of International Mobility for Global South Scholars in the Era of COVID-19: A Perception from a Nigerian Scholar (2022), Female Migration and Development in Nigeria (2019), and Globalization, Poverty, and Human Trafficking in Nigeria (2018).
Daisy has presented her research work at several international venues such as the American Society of Criminology Annual Meetings at Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, Missouri; the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) International Development Summit, British Library, London, UK; the British Society of Criminology (BSC) Annual Conference, Sheffield, UK; the African Studies Seminar Series, University of Oxford; the International Sociological Association (ISA) World Congress, Toronto, Canada; the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study “Law as Culture,” University of Bonn, Germany; the Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), University of Bonn, Germany; and the Global Young Academy International Conference of Young Scientists, just to mention a few.