Dr. Maria Pisani holds a BA and MA in Youth & Community Studies, and a PhD in Adult Education from the University of Malta. She previously held the post of Head of Office (Malta) for the International Organization for Migration (IOM). During this time she was responsible for a number of key projects related to refugee resettlement, AVR, and human trafficking, amongst others.

Maria is also a practitioner and an activist, and the co-founder and director of Integra Foundation. Her ongoing involvement in the field provides an opportunity to keep the dialectic relationship between theory and practice alive, providing the space for critical knowledge production towards social transformation.

Maria has published in international journals and contributed to a number of edited books and has been appointed as key expert in a number of inter/national research studies. She is also Editorial Board Member on the international journal Disability and the Global South (www.dgsjournal.org) and Guest Editor for the special issue, 'Disability, Asylum and Migration' for Disability and the Global South.

Her research interests include forced migration with a special focus on gendered migration; youth studies; critical pedagogy, political mobilization and social transformation; exploring the citizenship assumption within Western epistemologies, policy development and practice; the deconstruction of Western and other dominant epistemologies and practice: engaging praxis as a project of transformation; social injustice and the intersectionality of inter alia race/ethnicity, gender, age, legal status, disability; applying post and neo-colonial theories to the study of (forced) migration, critical pedagogy and social justice issues.