What does freedom mean to you?
Freedom, to me, presents the right to personal autonomy and the ability to shape one's own destiny. However, freedom also has a societal dimension in my view; it should address systemic barriers, such as poverty and exclusion from political processes, to empower individuals to pursue their aspirations and allow for the full realization of human potential.

How does freedom feature in your work?
My academic work directly engages with debates around freedom from two distinct perspectives. First, my research connects to the freedom of movement as one of the cornerstones of the European integration process, granting EU citizens the right to free movement and residence within the European Union. More specifically, I investigate public support for the widely established principle and practice of freedom of movement, and to what extent citizens discriminate between different groups. Second, my research contributes to debates about freedom in European welfare states by studying inequality and social policy preferences. Welfare states enhance positive freedom by providing social safety nets, access to healthcare, education, and other social benefits and services. In a similar vein, the development of a ‘Social Europe’ can be considered as enhancing positive freedom. Therefore, deeper insight into public preferences regarding the role of the state, the EU, and the balance between individual and collective responsibility can foster discussions about what freedom entails in the context of welfare state reforms and European integration.

What project(s) are you working on during your fellowship at the Forum Basiliense?
The project that I will be working on at the Forum Basiliense focuses on the free movement in the EU from the perspective of public opinion. An increasingly important question is how citizens perceive inequality and to what extent this creates new redistributive conflict over who should get what and why in the European Union. As a first step in addressing this question, my project will investigate the determinants of public support for the freedom of movement by using novel survey data that was collected in Germany; one of the most popular destination countries for intra-EU migration.