Norma Schemschat is a doctoral researcher at the Ecole normale supérieure (Ulm) in Paris and researcher at the University of Amsterdam, where she is member of the program group Political Sociology: Power, Place and Difference.

Former member of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie network RE-CITY, she holds a B.A. and an M.A. in political science from the University of Hamburg in Germany, where she worked mainly on forced migration discourses, including discourses on climate-induced migration, racism in German elite discourse, and the discursive construction of the 2015 crise d’accueil. After graduation, she worked for various NGOs and foundations. In her doctoral research, she studies the obstacles and opportunities related to the reception of refugees in ‘shrinking cities’ by investigating negotiations of place and belonging under conditions of urban decline. Within the BROAD-ER network, her work focusses on DIY-forms of urban migration governance.