Cristina Fernández Bessa
Investigator
About
Dr. Cristina Fernández Bessa is a Senior Research Fellow and lecturer in Criminology at the University of A Coruña. Previously, she was an adjunct professor at both the Pompeu Fabra University and the University of Barcelona (UB). In Barcelona she was also policy advisor on human rights and citizenship for Barcelona’s local administration and member of the Observatori del Sistema Penal i els Drets Humans (OSPDH). She has been a visiting scholar at US, Argentinian, Dutch and Italian universities. Dr Fernández Bessa is author of a book about immigration detention in Spain, has edited and co-authored 6 books, as well as 15 journal articles and 21 book chapters, some of them co-authored with Dr. Brandariz and others with members of the OSPDH. She has participated in 9 publicly funded research projects (7 of them EU-funded) and 7 research actions. Specifically, Dr. Fernández Bessa has conducted research about families of detainees, infectious diseases in Catalan prisons, violence against refugee and migrant women and immigration detention from a socio-legal perspective. She also has been engaged over 10 years in activist communities committed to migrant’s rights in Barcelona. . She will represent Spain on the Partner Engagement cluster and lead the Catalonia research hub.