Nicola Piper collaborated with UNRISD for the research project
South-South Migration and Development/Social Policy and Migration in Developing Countries from 2012-2014 and is regular contributor to UNRISD events or activities.
Nicola studied political science and Japanese at the University of Trier, Vienna, Sheffield and the Sophia University in Tokyo. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Sheffield in the UK. After several appointments at international, multi-disciplinary research institutes (e.g. the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen and the Regulatory Institutions Network at the Australian National University in Canberra) she was appointed as Senior Lecturer at Swansea University, UK, where she was co-director of the Centre for Migration Policy Research and subsequently Professor of Migration Studies at the University of Sydney where she founded and directed the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre. She was awarded a EU Marie Curie senior research fellowship at Freiburg University, Germany, between 2016 and 2017. In 2018 the British Academy offered her a Global Professor fellowship hosted by Queen Mary University of London’s Department of Law which commenced in January 2019.
In her research on international labour migration Nicola has been specifically concerned with global and regional governance and global politics; gender; political organizing of labour and advocacy politics; with empirical focus on Southeast, South and East Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Nicola is the co-editor of
Women and Work in Globalizing Asia (2002),
Wife or Worker? Asian Women and Migration (2003),
Transnational Activism in Asia – Problems of Power and Democracy (2004)
New Perspectives on Gender and Migration – Rights, Entitlements and Livelihoods (2008), and
South-South Migration: Implications for Social Policy and Development (2010, with Katja Hujo), and co-author of the monograph
Critical Perspectives on Global Governance: Rights and Regulation in Governing Regimes (2007, with Jean Grugel). She has guest-edited 12 special journal issues (with more in the pipeline) and is the author of numerous journal articles.
She is co-founder and co-editor of the Routledge book series Asian Migration, one of the four chief editors of the international peer-reviewed journal Global Social Policy and member of the editorial boards of a number of migration journals.