Hello, my name is Paula Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik and I joined the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po this September as an Assistant Professor.

In my research I'm mainly interested in the politics of the European Union and in immigration policy and politics.

This interest started already during my bachelor's at the University of Münster where I looked mainly at refugee policies and how European integration works at its basics. I then did a master's in EU politics at the LSE in London before starting a traineeship at the European Commission because I wanted to see also how immigration policy is done in practice and how the EU works. I then worked for the German government in the European Migration Network which is a network of European experts from the member states that meet in Brussels to discuss and to study immigration policies.

But I really realised that I'm always more interested in understanding the underlying logics of policymaking and so I decided to do a PhD at the University of Geneva. I was interested in forms of immigration that we often don't even call immigration or that we don't think of when we think about immigration. Free movement in the EU for example often gets called mobility or movement rather than immigration but also immigration that is facilitated by trade agreements often escapes the label of immigration. 
So in the PhD we developed a global data set that codes the immigration content of trade agreements and I was especially interested in looking at how the EU navigates this trade-immigration nexus, how EU trade agreements facilitate immigration, how this is also reflected in the laws and directives of the European Union but also how the European Union uses trade as leverage to control immigration and to enforce the return of migrants to their countries of origin.

In my postdoc at the University of Cologne, I then expanded my methodological toolbox and started to use quantitative text analysis and computational social science methods to analyze discourses on immigration. 
I had a project where I studied the discourse of the European Commission on returns policy, when it comes to returning immigrants that no longer have a right to stay in the European Union, that I did together with Philipp Stutz from the Free University of Brussels.
This is a project that I'm still pursuing at the moment, where I want to understand not only how the discourse of the European Commission has changed over time, but also what it can tell us about the role of the Commission in European integration dynamics more broadly.

In another project that I'm doing together with Jordy Weyns, we're interested in understanding how the EU reacted to the war in Ukraine, and more specifically, under what circumstances, or in which cases, the war in Ukraine led to a change in policy paradigms.
And we find that actually, contrary to what we've been thinking of what is necessary for policy reform in the EU, there has been reform in the energy sector, even though there was a lot of conflict between member states, and there has not been reform in the immigration
part, or at least not related to the Ukraine crisis, even though member states largely agreed on how to respond to the outbreak of the Ukraine war, and to welcome Ukrainian refugees.
We think this is because, in energy, the crisis weakened important veto players that were blocking the reform before, whereas this is not the case for immigration.

I joined the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics because it is a great research hub on all things EU, but also comparative politics in Europe, and I think my focus on immigration touches really on all of the aspects that are studied at the CEE, whether it's political representation, public policy, or also the intersection of markets and public policy, and of course, mobilities and migration.

Sciences Po, more broadly, of course, is a great centre for social science research that is multidisciplinary, and immigration as a topic is inherently multidisciplinary. So I'm also very excited to connect with the many scholars here.

And I'm also very excited to meet Sciences Po students who are going to be in the public sector, many of them, and I think my own experiences in this field also speak to that, and I can hopefully include that in my teaching as well.