Biography

Barbara Gornik is a Senior Research Associate at the Science and Research Centre Koper and an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Her research draws on the anthropology of human rights and discourse theory, using these theoretical frameworks to examine the implementation and interpretation of human and children’s rights. She focuses on how these rights are shaped by practice, knowledge and power dynamics within the fields of migration, transnational childhoods, nationalism, and activism.

She is researcher at the project “Asylum Policymaking: Affective States and Emotional Dimensions,” which she conducts as an associate at the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute. Additionally, she is 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” (funded by the Slovenian Research Agency, 2021-2025). 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 Action “Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe” (MiCREATE). This project, involving 15 partners from across the EU and beyond, aimed to explore the integration of migrant children and develop integration and asylum policies from a child-centered perspective, focusing specifically on their well-being, participation, and political agency.

She has published works on asylum, migrant integration, refugees, migrant children, international human rights law, particularly children’s rights and child-centered approaches. She has presented her work at conferences at institutions such as the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, the University of Geneva, Columbia University, the University of Bristol, the University of Dayton, the University of Wroclaw, Tallinn University, and the University of Copenhagen.