Name and Surname: Nikola Lero
Affiliation: Primary: University of Sheffield, Faculty of Social Sciences, United Kingdom Secondary: Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade
Contact email: nlero1@sheffield.ac.uk
Short Biography:
Nikola Lero is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield within the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in New Horizons in Borders and Bordering. He is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work bridges migration theories, multiculturalism, and spatial belonging. He earned his Master’s degree Summa Cum Laude from the Erasmus Mundus program in Migration and Intercultural Relations as a European Commission scholar in Norway and Germany, having previously graduated with a degree in law in Banja Luka (BiH), specializing in human rights with the Council of Europe and the OSCE. As a US Department of State Fulbright Scholar (2022–2023), he conducted research at St. Louis University on the integration of the Bosnian-American diaspora in Missouri, USA. Additionally, he served as a research assistant on the “Our Migration History” project at UC Berkeley (USA) and the University of Stavanger (Norway), and collaborated with the Migration Institute ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana. In 2026, he was a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking (CApE) at the University of Copenhagen, and in 2021, a Summer Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He has collaborated with UNESCO, UNICEF, and the OSCE in BiH, and was a Pat Cox Fellow at the European Parliament in Brussels. He is the co-founder of the migrant literary collective Blank Pages and the post-Yugoslav queer collective “Književna Zadruga”.
Research Abstract:
This doctoral research examines how the Yugoslav-Serb diaspora in the United Kingdom creates and practices a sense of spatial belonging despite borders, discrimination, and migrant origins. Drawing on Boccagni’s “homing” and Yuval-Davis et al.’s “everyday bordering,” the study builds upon Giddens’s concept of ontological security to develop a new theoretical framework of “the migrant struggle for ontological security” — understanding the diasporic condition as dialectical, stretched between networks of practices, relationships, and material anchors that migrants actively construct through everyday life despite persistent sociocultural barriers. The methodology combines life histories, participatory mapping, and ethnography with creative, arts-based approaches.