My research mobility supported by the YERUN RMA took place between April 25 – May 10, 2019, at three Barcelona-based academic institutions, two of which are YERUN members (UAB and UPF) and one is a think tank (IBEI) founded by several public bodies including YERUN members. My principal collaborators were Antoni Durà, Tenured Professor at Department of Geography, UAB and Andrea Noferini, Associate Professor at Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, UPF.
During my stay, I have been presenting the book “Twin Cities: Urban Communities, Borders and Relationships over Time” (co-edited with John Garrard, published in Routledge 2019) and the project “The transformation of Soviet Republic borders to international borders”. The culmination of my visit was the international seminar “Borders and Cross-Border Cooperation in Europe: Local and Regional Governance of internal and external EU borders” organised by the RECOT team (European Network of Territorial Cooperation stationed at UAB) on May 9-10, 2019. The two-day seminar gathered leading specialists in urban and regional development of borderlands from Spain, France, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic. Its programme included an in-depth scholarly discussion of urgent topics in Border Studies and collective brainstorming on future possibilities to collaborate.
Ekaterina Mikhailova is a postdoctoral researcher at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland in the project titled ‘The Transformation of Soviet Republic Borders to International Borders’ (funded by the Academy of Finland). Ekaterina received her ’specialist degree’ (a Russian equivalent of Master’s degree) in Public Administration at the Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2012 and her PhD in Human Geography at the Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences in 2018. As an early career border scholar, Ekaterina is an author of over thirty Russian and English articles on twin cities, cross-border communities, identities and cooperation and a coeditor of ‘Twin Cities: Urban Communities, Borders and Relationships over Time’ (with John Garrard, Routledge 2018). Her research interests include sustainable development of border regions and border cities, cross-border integration and governance. Ekaterina has been involved in collecting empirical data and analysing cross-border interactions along Russian borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine and China, as well as at the Swedish–Norwegian and Spanish–French borders. From 2012 to 2014, Ekaterina worked in FP7 research project ‘EUBORDERREGIONS’. Ekaterina’s recent English journal articles are ‘Collaborative problem-solving in cross-border context: learning from paired local communities along the Russian border’ (2017) and ‘Are Refugees welcome to the Arctic? Perceptions of Arctic Migrants at the Russian–Norwegian Borderland’ (2018). Ekaterina’s ORCID ID
