Email: l.bonilla@ucl.ac.uk

Lauren Bonilla is a Research Associate at University College London. She is a Human Geographer and Social Anthropologist. Since 2003, she has been involved in independent and collaborative research projects in Mongolia, exploring themes such as social and environmental change, the extractive industry, development policy, and historical geography. She has traveled to all of Mongolia’s 21 provinces, and her current research examines how the recent expansion of large-scale mining is giving rise to new identities, ecologies, economies, and politics. She has taught at Chinggis Khaan University in Ulaanbaatar and worked as a Program Director for a Mongolia-focused sustainable travel company.

Dr. Namsaraeva is a Senior Research Associate at University of Cambridge (UK) and a member of the Cambridge Migration Research Network. She does research in Historical and Social Anthropology, focusing on historical and present day transborder trade and labour migration between Russia, China and Mongolia. Her recent academic publication “Dystopian Mongolia: Reconceptualization of the Home Country by Mongolian Asylum Seekers in UK” (Namsaraeva, 2021) based on anonymized stories of the Mongolian asylum seekers in the UK, which Sayana has been reviewing as a Mongolia COI expert for the last five years, critically analyses the UK legal and asylum systems.