Prof. Dr. Sakura Yamamura (RWTH Aachen University)

Sakura Yamamura is Professor in Human Geography at the RWTH Aachen University. Developing her expertise in urban diversity and migration issues, she brings new perspectives into the human geography of migration and mobility. With a focus on the digitalization of society as a societal context, she looks into the urban transformation and socio-spatial practices of the migration-led diversification of contemporary societies. She engages with novel methodological approaches in capturing such processes by developing and integrating digital methods in human geography. Her broader cultural geographical approach in research encompasses topics of different types and characteristics of transnational migration, their multi-scalar contextual embeddedness and the socio-spatial transformation in such diversification processes.

Sakura was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociocultural Diversity from September 2018 to February 2022. With her expertise in migration studies, urban and economic geography, her work focussed on the spatiality of migrant-led diversities in global cities, such as Frankfurt and Tokyo. Applying both quantitative and qualitative methods, she worked on the geographical localization and conceptual concretization of transnational spaces, shedding new light on social-spatial urban transformations induced by the interaction of different transnational actors. She studied geography, sociology, and social/cultural anthropology at the University of Hamburg, Université de Paris 1 - Sorbonne and the University of California at Berkeley. She previously worked for the Migration Research Group at the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI), in the International Migration Division of the OECD, and at the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). She was Junior Visiting Fellow at the Maastricht Centre for Citizenship, Migration, and Development (MACIMIDE) at Maastricht University, and lectured at the Geography Departments of the University of Hamburg and Kiel.