The ANU Australian Studies Institute (AuSI) is pleased to welcome our next Visiting Fellow from our 2023-24 Visiting Fellowship Program, Dr Ferran Martinez.

During his Fellowship, Ferran will assess reasons for migration preferences of the Australian people over immigration as well as the variations in these attitudes. Ferran will assess not only the views of the Australian people on migrant numbers, but also on the reason for migration. The general research questions are: Do the reasons for migration matter for preferences of the Australian people over immigration? And what explains variations in these attitudes?

With climate change increasingly impacting our lives, Ferran will look into climate migrants as a group of migrants that have recently raised attention and study the preferences of the Australian people towards such group. He will assess how their importance will increase in the coming years, as climate change and environmental hazards impact the Indo-Pacific.

Ferran’s Fellowship at The Australian National University (ANU) will allow him to collaborate with corresponding ANU researchers including further developing existing connections with colleagues at the ANU School of Politics and International Relations.

"Coming to AuSI opens the opportunity to meet and network with other colleagues from different disciplines with an interest in Australian research. Additionally, ANU has a superb department in my field, political science. Interacting with such colleagues is a unique opportunity I am looking forward to."

- Dr Ferran Martinez, Visiting Fellow, ANU Australian Studies Institute

Dr Ferran Martinez i Coma is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University. An applied political scientist with consulting, public policy, research and teaching experience, his current research specialises in elections, electoral integrity, comparative politics, political parties and electoral behaviour. Before Griffith, Ferran worked at the University of Sydney within the Electoral Integrity Project and at the Centro de Investigaciones y Docencia Economicas (CIDE) in Mexico City. Ferran has also been a policy practitioner at the national – as a Senior Adviser in the Policy Unit of Spain's Prime Minister's office and as a Technical Adviser at the Ministry of Internal Affairs- and local level (as a Technical Adviser in the Department of Studies and Evaluation at Barcelona City Hall).

He has written 18 policy reports for international organizations such as the Organisation of American States (OAS), International IDEA, and think tanks such as the Centre for American Progress (USA), Hanns Seidel Foundation (Germany, Namibia and Kenya) and Fundación Alternativas (Spain). Ferran has published in top-leading journals in political science, sociology and economics. He regularly contributes for SBS in both domestic and international matters. He also periodically writes in the blog Piedras de Papel in eldiario.es.