Research Program

Early Stage Research Projects Overview

ESR1 - Nurturing solidarities in diversity in social enterprises

Eline de Jong

Claims around who deserves what and why, are intrinsically linked to practices of solidarity in organizational and institutional contexts. While in some cases, such deservingness claims serve to foster solidarity, in other instances they impede solidarity by delineating boundaries of in- and exclusion. This research project is concerned with solidarities across difference in social enterprises, third sector organizations which pursue social goals by means of the market. These organizational ‘hybrids’ occupy a locally negotiated middle ground between the private, public and non-profit sector and are promoted as key sites for community development and the battling of social exclusion. What kinds of solidarity emerge in such a context, or why instead do solidarities fail to materialize? That is what this research project aims to provide insights into.

Through a multi-sited ethnography of different organizations which focus on housing and labor market integration, the project seeks to investigate how deservingness acts as a moral assessment of distribution processes which reflects the limits of and hierarchies within logics and practices of solidarity. In doing so, it contributes to debates on the ambivalence of solidarity and the conditionality of social support in Europe, as well as the role of third sector organizations in engendering social change.

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: University of Antwerp, Belgium - Centre for Research on Environmental and Social Change (CRESC)

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: University of Vienna, Austria - Department of Sociology

• Non-academic secondments: a social housing cooperative in Flanders, and Herwin, a Flemish umbrella organization for social entrepreneurship.

ESR2 - Citizenship education and beyond: the role of education in fostering solidarity in diversity

Marloes Vrolijk

Researchers and policymakers in Flanders have made a double request for schools to pay attention to “citizenship” on the one hand and “diversity” on the other. These appeals to schools arise from various concerns, such as a concern for the perpetuation of student inequalities through secondary schooling. We study what citizenship and diversity mean in school practices and how they come together (or not) from the perspectives and experiences of students, teachers, and school directors. Our central research questions are: How are citizenship and diversity enacted in urban Flemish secondary schools, and when and why do difficulties and opportunities arise? We aim to answer these questions by working together with two urban Flemish schools, where we gather insights through (group) interviews, (lesson) observations, document analyses and participatory methods. Further relevant questions are arising by focusing on these school practices: What differences make a difference in the teaching of citizenship? What place do student’s acts of citizenship get at school? To what extent are school practices of citizenship educational? And what does all of this have to do with solidarity (if the concept is at all relevant here)?

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: University of Antwerp, Belgium - Department of Training and Education Sciences - Research group Edubron

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: Maynooth University, Ireland - Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy

• Non-academic secondments: Onderwijsnetwerk Antwerpen, and SIRIUS, Policy Network on Migrant Education

  
  

ESR3 - The unaccompanied refugee minors’ experiences of solidarity in their everyday social life

Joelle Badran

The accommodation of refugees in Europe has sparked multiple forms of solidarity. While the majority of the research on solidarity focuses on practices among adults, little is known about children’s experiences of solidarity, particularly unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs). Studies with URMs reveal that despite having their basic needs often provided by the asylum reception systems in Europe, the recognition of their voices and agency as unique individuals is mostly faced with encounters of struggle.

Theories of recognition are strongly connected to the concept of solidarity, among which is the work of Axel Honneth who considers recognition as intersubjective patterns of love, rights, and social esteem. Situated in Honneth’s approach and with a lens of the new social studies of childhood that positions minors as active agents in the construction of their lives, the research project aims to provide new insights into the URMs’ experiences of solidarity through the three spheres of emotional, legal, and social recognition.

The project will focus on a group of URMs involved in the asylum process in Belgium. It will conduct qualitative analysis to generate empirical findings and investigate the emergence as well as the lack of solidarity in societal and institutional contexts. Ethnographic fieldwork using participatory methods, along with discourse analysis and document analysis, will be adopted.

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: University of Antwerp, Belgium - Centre for Research on Environmental and Social Change (CRESC)

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: Universiteit voor Humanistiek, the Netherlands

• Non-academic secondments: SOS Kinderdorpen België

ESR4 - Solidarities under strain: place-based identities in turbulent times

Bridget Shaffrey

“Solidarities Under Strain: Place-Based Identities in Turbulent Times” explores the dynamics of socio-political solidarities in coastal, ‘left-behind’ communities of the United Kingdom in the context of intersecting crises. The project primarily focuses upon how the geographical identity of left-behindedness simultaneously shapes and is shaped by different solidarities as they contest intersecting forms of crisis. Herein, it thinks through ‘left-behind’ places as a contested, ambivalent subject of crisis, considering how various solidarities either affirm or refuse this identity in their place-based practices and sense of place. Importantly, however, this work also attends to the failures, fragmentations, and contradictions of these solidaristic dynamics. As such, this research is not only concerned with the multitudes and varieties of forms, identities, and practices adapted by solidarities but also how various solidarities compete, collide, and co-constitute one another in and through the left-behind as a crisis-laden space. Consequently, it seeks to examine two intersecting geohistorical and socio-political dimensions of solidarity: 

1. The diverse forms of labour that go into maintaining solidarities and forms of place-based identity, pride and collectivity in the context of political crisis; 

2. The geohistorical and contemporary tensions and fractures of place that undermine and challenge solidarities, addressing how solidarities may fail, or be overridden.

This research focuses on the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, a town with a long history of border politics. Berwick’s history has seen the town incorporated in both England and Scotland at different points, with its present identification as part of the North East of England being challenged by political parties in both countries. Given its border history, its coastal geography, its relative socioeconomic disadvantage, and its ageing population, Berwick presents a unique opportunity to explore how place-based solidarities, senses of identity and collectivity, are maintained and challenged in the turbulent politics of the present. In order to explore these dynamics, the research developed a multi-method ethnographic approach, utilizing media, document, and archival analysis, interviews, participant observation, and ‘walking as method’ with various solidarity groups in the area.

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: Durham University, UK

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: Uppsala University, Sweden

• Non-academic secondments: Citizen Songwriters
  

ESR5 - Nurturing and creating solidarity with migrant teachers: a public education issue

Bernadette Mizzi

Despite the increasing prevalence of private forms of education, international education development discourse and policymaking still consider public education to be an important means of educating (future) citizens and fostering social integration and cohesion. However, there is a notable lack of attention given to how migrant teachers can contribute to this public mission, a phenomenon observed in many countries, including Ireland.  Migrant teachers who have qualified outside the country where they now reside encounter unique challenges, including credentialing, respect, economic precarity, experiences of inclusion, and feelings of belonging.  These challenges are exacerbated by the long-standing close relationship between education and culture, wherein teachers play a pivotal role in enabling cultural continuity by passing on traditions, social norms, and ways of doing things. As such, migrant teachers often find themselves marginalised within educational discourse, subjected to deficit narratives that dismiss their practice and experiences as outdated and out-of-place. 

­­­­Consequently, this study revisits the notion of public education within the Irish context through the idea of publicness as a process of interrelatedness and interconnectedness to allow for a more nuanced understanding of public education and the role of migrant teachers.  While education plays a role in cultural continuity, this study acknowledges that education is not at the service of socialisation. Instead, education is always implicated in transforming societal traditions, norms, and conventions through its own practices of pedagogical interaction. By paying attention to notions of relation, experience, and formation/transformation, the research explores the professional and relational orientations of migrant teachers and how their stories about relationality can inform a view of solidarity.  In order to explore these dynamics, Bernardette Mizzi collaborated with a diverse group of migrant teachers and developed a series of art-informed collective biography encounters to gain insight into their unique perspectives, educational biographies, situational commonalities, evolving connections and solidarity as they navigate the educational landscape inc Ireland.

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: Maynooth University, Ireland - Department of Education and Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: University of Malta, Malta

• Non-academic secondments: The Migrant Teacher Project, a non-academic partner located at the Marino Institute of Education, Ireland

ESR6 - From representation to solidarity: enhancing democracy through migrants’ political participation

Lea Baro

While there is no doubt that representation matters, grave representational deficits remain all over Europe. Public institutions meant to serve and reflect the population fail to represent minorities, especially those with experiences of migration, discrimination, and racism. To meaningfully enable representation, institutions need know what makes people “feel represented” and how this feeling can be achieved.

This project brings feminist traditions of affect theory to representation, approaching it in an intersectional and relational way. It asks if feeling represented is tied to people, to characteristics, to processes to places or symbols? Is it about being “heard” and “seen”, so rather about being understood than represented? Is “feeling represented” affectively distinct and is it what is at play in the context of underrepresentation? How can we move beyond diversity policy to meaningfully support people with experiences of migration, discrimination, and racism? Those are all questions that this project takes as a starting point to discover what it means to “feel represented” and how this feeling can help increase representation in the context of German public institutions.

Since representation is complex and abstract this project uses different methods at different levels of analysis. On the personal level, creative methodologies are used to help the participants materialize their feelings on the topic of representation. In this phase the project works with queer migrants who often face many forms of discrimination on top of their migration experience making them valuable research partners in the question of what it means to feel represented. In a collective research and evaluation process queer migrants work out what feeling represented means to them in interviews and focus groups employing photovoice, mapping and collaging techniques. On an institutional level a discourse analysis of diversity policy can shine light on tensions between target groups and conceptual unclarity of the diversity concept. Who do institutions mean when they say diversity and to what extent is representation parts of these policies?  In the last project phase diversity professionals in institutions are interviewed and institutional processes are analyzed to bring the knowledge on the first two phases together bridging the levels and aiming to find ways to make people “feel represented”.

The project aims to weave together multiple theoretical and methodological strands breaking away from classical representational theories to be able to find a more meaningful and situated way to discuss representation by treating it as something with real affective consequences, shifting the attention from the representatives and institutions to the constituents.

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: The German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), Germany

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: Universiteit voor Humanistiek (UvH), the Netherlands

• Non-academic secondments: BKMO, German Federal Conference of Migrant Organizations, Germany

ESR7 - Solidarity in diversity within youth work. Towards an ethnography-based public pedagogy

Jesse Torenbosch

There has been an ever-increasing crisis in which vocational education and training (VET) finds itself, both in Flanders and internationally. On one hand, the importance of VET for both the economy and (technological) innovation is emphasized in public discourses. On the other hand, in the eyes of the average Flemish individual VET is not an attractive educational prospect and more and more youths do not seem interested in the kind of labour that is being taught in vocational schools. However, in Flemish youth work another development seems to be taking place: more and more programs and initiatives directly engage with labour and work. These programs and initiatives range from offering a “first” labour experience in youth houses, to also specific art- or labour market focused initiatives. In these initiatives youths are being engaged with and through labour.

This thesis has different approach to youth work than has been made in youth work research up until now. A lot of youth work research either very quickly essentializes the practice of youth work, or mythologizes what it is “supposed to be” and any practice that does not adhere to that ideal is not studied. Furthermore, these expectations very often lead to youth work practices being approached purely in terms of their social or policy functionality. In these cases, if youth work is researched, it is often researched in terms its methodologies or to what extent youth work succeeds in fulfilling these assigned functions. Thus, youth work is often under many expectations, which are also very often at odds with one another. However, my research focus is not on youth work as a social practice as such, but rather as an educational practice in its own right. In other words, my aim is to understand what currently happens in youth work and why it is meaningful to the youths who attend it, rather than trying to optimize the methodologies of youth work. Therefore, the aim of the research is to explicate a pedagogical consideration of youth work that both respects the concrete practice of the modern day empirically, while acknowledging the many difficult and often paradoxical theoretical and societal expectations that are hoisted on the shoulders of youth work. As such, this thesis works from a empirical basis and uses widely varied conceptual underpinnings to both clarify the daily vocational practice of youth work and the paradoxical functions these daily practices try to fulfill.

The hypothesis of this research is that youth work performs a particular public pedagogy that not only engages all youths who participate in it with labours that are different from the kind of labour that is offered in formal VET, but also that youth work does so from a unique educational character of a solidarity with the present. In this case I define solidarity as the possibility for anyone who is part of the collective environment of youth work to engage, contribute, and be acknowledged for that contribution in the daily practice of youth work, no matter who they happen to be.

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: Durham University, UK

• Non-academic secondments: Formaat and Urban Words, Belgium
  

ESR8 - Intersectional solidarity and activism

Lee Eisold

There seems to be a consensus that – if understood and applied ‘correctly’ – an intersectional lens holds a positive transformative potential for activist struggles. Intersectionality has become a model lens or tool that many activist groups and endeavours aspire to. Broadly speaking, intersectionality sees different systems of oppression, experiences of discrimination and social categories as interwoven, mutually constitutive and therefore inseparable. Aside from this broad definition, however, what intersectionality ‘really’ means and how it relates to activist practices is heatedly debated both in (non-)academic literature and in activist spaces more generally. In conversation with activists from grassroots and civil society organisations engaged in a variety of different struggles in Flanders, I examine how these actors understand and use ideas of intersectionality in the specific political and institutional context in which they are located. In politically induced moments of crisis for and threats towards marginalized groups, some feel that time is lacking for the conversations, learning and careful coalition-building between and within groups that would be needed to apply an intersectional lens to their activist practice. I am asking how this affects activist spaces and what it would take for these spaces to feel welcoming and safe to people with different experiences of discrimination and marginalization. With this, the project aims to contribute to ongoing (non)academic debates about the meaning, scope and use of intersectionality in the Flemish/Belgian context. The intention is to create output that helps to facilitate reflections and conversations on the creation of inspiring and effective activist spaces for all.

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: Uppsala University, Sweden

• Non-academic secondments: Expeditions vzw, anthropology organisation in Malta, and Kifkif vzw Belgium (an antiracist organisation in Flanders)

ESR9 - Intersectional solidarities: supporting LGBT migrants in a superdiverse city

Xin Pan

This ESR project intends to examine the experiences of queer women or non-binary migrants of colour in the non-Metropolitan city Leicester. Most of the scholarship in the field of queer migrants narrates from perspectives of white gay men in Metropolitan cities, this research however, situates itself with queer women or non-binary migrants to understand sexual politics and solidarity practices in this superdiverse yet longtime-taken-as-ethnically-segregated provincial city. It critically presents and examines multiple on-going processes of history-making and dynamics of the (imagined) queer people of color community, in order to respond to the homogeneous narrative and sexual politics of queer people of colour, through the lens of queer women or non-binary migrants. It illustrates how these queer women or non-binary migrants experience the spatial-temporal places in and beyond the city, where and what do they do in the city when practicing their sexual desires, gender and ethnic identities, how the practices entangle with their previous migratory experiences? By using (auto)ethnographic methods, in-depth interview and participatory mapping, this research intends to understand different practices and processes of the interactions of every day encounters in multiple spatial-temporal places that (may or may not) facilitate solidarity.

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: University of Leicester, UK

• Start date: November 2021

• Academic secondment: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

• Non-academic secondments: Trade Sexual Health, UK ( a health charity which provides free, confidential health advice, information, services and support for LGBTQ people and new arrivals across Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland in the UK)

ESR10 - Understanding how young people’s complex racialised discourses and practices shape solidarities in an ethnically diverse city: Building skills, sharing knowledge

Solinda Morgillo

Brexit is framed as a racist act, shaking and breaking Britain into an “us” and “the other” and leaving the question of solidarity floating in the air. Further, years of austerity, Covid-19 and a conservative government led to a defunding of spaces dedicated to social encounters for young people e.g youth centres, leisure clubs, etc. This socio-geographical research of a gym's everyday aims to understand what its socio-spatial functions, are in order to explore how and why solidarities are experienced (or not) between diverse racialized humans. By using a framework of black methodology and slow spatial research this project contributes methodologically to academic and social debates around diversity lived in the everyday and how they stand in dialogue to geo-temporal and -spatial macro-level processes (see slowmess.com).

Following violent unrest in Leicester, Solinda Morgillo collaborated with diverse youth groups to gain insights into their histories, backgrounds, migrations, and local movements. The outcome is a report submitted to Leicester City Council, amplifying the voices of young people from diverse backgrounds and advocating for the creation of more spaces that foster encounters and connections among them.

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: University of Leicester, UK

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: University of Antwerp, Belgium

• Non-academic secondments: Leicester City Youth Services, and Martial Arts Gym in Leicester

ESR11 - Political activism for public pedagogy. A study in ‘dissenting’ solidarity

Julia Alegre Mouslim

How does education happen in political activism? How do activists and their communities engage in and experience education? In which ways do these activist educational experiences and pedagogies nurture the endurance of their communities, the performance of solidarity, and the education of the public?

Through an intersectional feminist and decolonial lens, Julia works as a Ph.D. student on political activism and public pedagogy. In this research project, she takes political activism and feminist pedagogies of resistance as a departure to rethink the complex, embodied, and educational relations formed in coming together through political activist assemblies.

To flesh out these embodied, educational and performative aspects of political activism, Julia will draw on a) Judith Butler’s performative theory of assembly and Sara Ahmed’s politics of emotion and complaint, b) ethnographic and participatory methods such as interviews, participant diaries, auto-photography, visual ethnography, graphic anthropology, sound ethnography, and auto-ethnography, and c) active involvement with the left-wing Maltese organisation Moviment Graffitti.

By developing new ways of understanding the lived, embodied and emotional experiences of activists in Malta, this research aims to show different ways in which education plays a vital role in the durability of activist communities and the radicalisation of the public.

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: University of Malta, Malta

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: University of Leicester, UK

• Non-academic secondments: Moviment Graffitti, Malta

ESR12 - Bridging solidarity in neighbourhood teams

Akofa Boglo

Dutch neighbourhoods, particularly in urban areas, are in many ways becoming more diverse. Meanwhile social work in the Netherlands has taken a localised, neighbourhood-based approach which sees social workers strive not only to support individuals and those close to them, but also to promote a sense of solidarity amongst residents. How are mutual trust and support nurtured in changing social landscapes, and what is the role of social work in promoting solidarity in places where the local and global intersect and differences seem sometimes to increase the distance between residents?

The project is qualitative and methods include (walking)interviews, mapping and (participant)observations with residents, volunteers, and professionals in community centres in two Dutch neighbourhoods. Using this approach, I ask which practices are used, what the role of shared spaces is, and which boundaries are salient when it comes to localised solidarity, understandings of neighbourhood, and community.

I apply concepts of boundary-work and imagined communities to social work practice and aim to combine a sociological and geographical lens. In doing so I hope to create space to ask what happens when we look at boundaries not as given but as relational and constructed, so that bridging them may involve venturing into transformative liminal spaces in which solidarities may be created and (re)negotiated.

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: Universiteit voor Humanistiek (UvH), the Netherlands

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: University of Antwerp, Belgium

• Non-academic secondments: Ons Welzijn/Lentl, Oss and Buurts, Haarlem

ESR13 - Competing solidarities: sexual justice vs cultural justice in social work?

Chloé Roegiers-Mayeux

Domestic violence against women is unfortunately a worldwide phenomenon. Starting from Okin’s (1999) idea that some cultures tolerate violence towards women more than others, we show that it is more complicated and multifactorial.  With this research, I have had access to a women’s shelter in the Netherlands where I could conduct fieldwork. There I had the opportunity to interview ten women and talk to many more about the challenges they experienced in leaving their partner. Recurring responses were the Dutch policy, cultural expectations and family solidarity, which led me to dive deeper into these topics. Next to this, 37 social workers have also been interviewed about the same topics, but also on their own way of working focusing the women’s gender, nationality and cultural background.

I make use of multiple concepts of solidarity as theoretical perspective. Next to this, diving deeper into the social workers, Serene Khader’s non-ideal feminist universalism is used as another theoretical angle. In 2023, together with Sawitri Saharso, Evelien Tonkens and Jonathan Darling, I have published an article on the Dutch policies on (marriage) migration and domestic violence: “Institutional Solidarity in The Netherlands: Examining the Role of Dutch Policies in Women with Migration Backgrounds’ Decisions to Leave a Violent Relationship”, https://www.mdpi.com/2564370

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: Universiteit voor Humanistiek (UvH), the Netherlands

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: Durham University, UK

• Non-academic secondments: Pharos Expertise center, Health differences, the Netherlands (https://www.pharos.nl/)

ESR14- Rural practices of solidarities in diversity in the labour movement

Zinaïda Sluijs

In Sweden, rural areas have become key “welcoming spaces” hosting forced migrants. In these regions, civil society has played an important actor supporting newly arrived asylum seekers, offering, for example, social - and language activities. Zinaïda is exploring the role of a specific civil society actor, “folkbildning” in a rural region in mid-Sweden. Folkbildning refers to the Swedish tradition of “popular non-formal adult education”, encompassing both study associations and folk high schools. The research project departed from a close collaboration with the Swedish Workers’ Educational Association (Arbetarnas Bildningsförbund, ABF), but has expanded to other organisations as well.

Since 2015, the Swedish government has commissioned folkbildning organisations to provide “meaningful activities” for asylum seekers. Zinaïda explores what solidarities do (not) arise between asylum seekers, Swedish residents, and other participants within spaces of folkbildning. In 2023, the right-wing government announced budget cuts for some of these activities for asylum seekers. Therefore, part of the research is also dedicated to exploring how the political context shapes and transforms the solidarities between folkbildning actors and asylum seekers.

The research is based on a long-term ethnographic approach, including participatory observation at ABF and other organisations where Zinaïda participates as a volunteer in the organisation of study circles and other activities. Additionally, she conducts qualitative interviews with various participants, including Swedish residents and people in the asylum process. She also explores participatory and creative methods such as collage workshops, walking interviews and mapping exercises.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CfVwM8og-6N/ (for a glimps behind the scene)

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: Uppsala University - Department of Human Geography, Sweden

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven - Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Belgium.

• Non-academic secondments: Arbetarnas bildningsförbund - the Swedish Workers’ Educational Association, Sweden (participation in various study circles for and with asylum seekers)

ESR15 - Solidarities and conflicts in governing migrant integration on urban scale

Hannah Sommer

Due to my professional experience, especially in the context of my work for the Munich Refugee Council, I gained an understanding of the workings of the asylum system and its underlying logics of selection. These experiences have led me to a starting point of research that does not consider ‘migration’ as a topic to be studied, but rather as a perspective to be adopted to study social relations. This means especially considering global hegemonic relations and the differentiated (im)possibilities of people’s mobilities.

The research project examines the governance of migration and workings of borders on both the regime and everyday level in contemporary Europe. Depending on one’s nationality, race, financial resources and gender (amongst others), one is more or less likely to have the possibility of entering European territory in a regular way or to be subject to exclusionary bordering processes. Yet, this kind of control through bordering practices is not limited to the geographical borders of European territory, but also extends to the local level, for example in urban settings. Furthermore, it is not only performed by actors on the level of state agencies or private service providers, but also happens in everyday interactions. Against this background, it is the objective of this project to contribute to a broader theory of borders by investigating everyday bordering practises and their effects on subjectivities as part of an analysis of local border regimes. I aim to shed light on questions such as how and why bordering practices are performed and how the mechanisms that fortify them are legitimized but also challenged. The project aims to scrutinize the potential of the urban space for practices of solidarity subverting and challenging these bordering processes and their exclusionary intentions and effects.

• Host organization and PhD enrolment: University of Vienna, Austria

• Start date: September 2021

• Academic secondment: DeZIM - Berlin, Germany

• Non-academic secondments: Human rights Büro of the City of Vienna, Austria