Mara Junge is a postdoctoral researcher at the German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM) in the Consensus and Conflict department. She is a researcher in Project B04 "Immigrant Social Rights – How Inclusion and Exclusion Shape Migrants' Life Chances and Lived Experiences" and a guest researcher at the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen.
Her research focuses on the intersections of migration policy, welfare states, and civil society activism. She is currently particularly interested in the role of strategic litigation in migration law, social media as sites of knowledge production and dissemination in the migration context, and civil society contestation of social and migration-related rights.
She is part of the Immigrant Social Rights project, which compiles a multidimensional de-jure policy dataset on the social rights of migrants by residence category across 45 countries and five world regions for the period 1980–2021. The dataset covers access to social assistance, unemployment insurance, child benefits, old-age pensions, and workers' compensation.
In 2025, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Social Policy at the LSE. Her earlier research in the SFB project "Causes of Inclusion and Exclusion: Immigrant Welfare Rights in Global Comparison" examined inclusion and exclusion in welfare states, with a focus on political parties, courts, and civil society. Mara Junge completed her doctorate at the University of Bremen and the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), focusing on the interplay of migration regimes, welfare states, political systems, and civil society organisations. She studied political science at Freie Universität Berlin and holds a double master's degree in European Labour Studies and Social Policy from the University of Bremen and the University of Milan.
Research focus
- Social Policy & Inequality
- Migration regimes
- Political Systems in comparative perspective
- Political Parties & Civil society