Felipa Schmidt
My name is Felipa, I am from Germany and I was a research intern for SIHMA from May to August 2020. I had originally intended to come to Cape Town from February to August 2020 to complete the internship, yet as the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the international travel bans were put in place, the internship became remote. Despite having a remote internship, the wealth of knowledge that I gained was not impacted. I came to...
Emma Dionne
My name is Emma Dionne. I am from Rhode Island, USA. I received my Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Criminology in 2017 from Stonehill College in Massachusetts. I came to Cape Town to gain an international perspective before furthering my education. I volunteered at the Scalabrini Study Centre in Cape Town from April to June 2019. Some of my specific activities included creating a country profile that will be used to establish an online atlas of migration...
Isabel Hacket
My name is Isabel Hacket. After arriving at SIHMA, I got a chance to get involved with multiple aspects of the organization and engage with the motivated and kind people who work there. My first two weeks were exclusively with SIHMA as I did research with a visiting professor from Northern Arizona University on one of Scalabrini Centre's very own programs, the Women’s Platform. For that work, I took notes during focus group interviews, and I am currently...
Lola Verkuil
My name is Lola, I’m 23 years old and I come from the Netherlands. I have been a research intern at SIHMA for five months, from October 2019 to March 2020. Before I came to SIHMA, I had just graduated with two master’s degrees in International Development and Anthropology. I decided that I wanted to gain some more hands-on experience in research – preferably abroad – before I would find a full-time job in the Netherlands. Since I had...
Licia Calcagno
My name is Licia Calcagno. I studied for an MA in Advanced Migration Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and applied fo this internship with SIHMA to fulfil my study requirements. I was thrilled to have this opportunity because I believed, and I still do, that European institutions focus a lot on migration towards Europe while they tend to disregard migration flows in the rest of the world, especially South-South migration. Thanks to my internship with SIHMA, I was...
Giacomo Distefano
My name is Giacomo Distefano. I am 26 years old and I come from Bologna, Italy. I am a doctor and I am particularly interested in paediatric neuropsychiatry. In the last few years, tired of hearing the same empty anti-migrant rhetoric, I started to be more and more attracted by the world of migration. For this reason, during the summer of 2018 I joined a volunteering program organised by the Scalabrinian Agency for Development and Cooperation (ASCS) in...
