Asst. Prof. Dr. Barbara Gornik

Barbara Gornik is a Senior Research Associate at the Science and Research Centre Koper, an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and an Associate at the European University Institute in Florence. Her research draws on the anthropology of human rights and discourse theory, examining how rights are shaped through practices, forms of knowledge, and power relations in the fields of migration, nationalism, and activism. She is a researcher on the project “Asylum Policymaking: Affective States and Emotional Dimensions”, which she carries out as an external associate at the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute. She also leads the Jean Monnet Action “Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union: An Anthropological Perspective” (funded by the European Commission, 2024–2027).

From 2019 to 2022, Barbara Gornik served as the academic co-coordinator of the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation project “Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe” (MiCREATE). The project, involving 15 partners from across the European Union and beyond, focused on researching the integration of migrant children and on developing integration and asylum policies from a child-centred perspective, with particular emphasis on their well-being, participation, and political agency. In addition, she was the coordinator of the research project “Freedom of Opinion and Expression through Narratives on the State of Emergency: An Anthropological Study of Slovenian (Anti)Democratic Consciousness during the COVID-19 Pandemic” (2021–2025).

She has published extensively on asylum, migrant integration, refugees, migrant children, and international human rights law, particularly children’s rights and child-centred approaches. She has presented her research at conferences hosted by institutions such as the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Geneva, Columbia University, the University of Bristol, the University of Dayton, the University of Wrocław, Tallinn University, and the University of Copenhagen.