Mengia Tschalaer is a legal and social anthropologist whose work examines how Westernized conceptions of human rights affect the access to justice of minority groups at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and religion. Between 2018 and 2020 she led an EU funded project which examined the experiences of LGBTQI+ asylum seekers with Muslim background within Germany’s asylum system. She is the author of "Muslim Women's Quest for Justice: Gender, Law, and Activism in India" (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and of various articles and chapters on socio-legal resistance, gender, sexuality, migration/asylum, and Islam. She is the co-founder and coordinator of the Queer European Asylum Network.  

 

Mengia Tschalaer is a Professor of Anthropology and Law and Society at City University of New York and an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. She was a Board Member of the Gender Committee to the ITFLOWS project at Brunel Law School in London and a collaborator on the British Academy project "Understanding LGBTQ Refugees' and Asylum Seekers' Support Needs through Listening to Autobiographical Storytelling" at Bournmouth University, UK. Mengia has been a research consultant for migration and asylum organizations such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration (ORAM).

 

Mengia Tschalaer is the recipient of the prestigious Marie Curie Individual Fellowship (2018-2020) and her research received support from the Swiss National Science Foundation, University of Zurich, the Gunda-Werner Institute, the ESRC, and Columbia University.