Saskia Bonjour
Saskia Bonjour is associate professor in political science at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the politics of migration and citizenship in the Netherlands and in Europe. The role of family, gender, and sexuality norms in the construction of national, cultural and racial identities is central in her research. She has also published about party politics, the role of the judiciary in policymaking, and the impact of EU migration policies on domestic politics. Here is a video where she talks about her research on family norms in migration politics and how that research resonates with her own family history.
Email: s.a.bonjour@uva.nl
Eline Westra
Eline Westra is a PhD researcher at the political science department of the University of Amsterdam. Her research project looks at five decades of political debates over the rights and belonging of Surinamese-Dutch citizens in the Netherlands, from the 1970s to the present. In her research, she has focused on the perspectives of Surinamese-Dutch citizens and activist organisations concerning migration- and social policy, and their role in (re)defining what 'nation' and 'family' mean in a postcolonial context.
Email: e.westra@uva.nl
Publications can be found here
Sonja Evaldsson Mellström
Sonja Evaldsson Mellström is a PhD researcher at the department of political science, University of Amsterdam (UvA) where her research project looks at transnational queer family migration between France and Central/West Africa. Sonja’s PhD project explores how queer family life is (re)configured through transnational migration and how class, gender, race, sexuality and citizenship is constitutive of migration processes.
Mira Ducommun is a PhD researcher at the laboratoire d’études des procéssus sociaux of the University of Neuchâtel and a visiting PhD at the political science department of the University of Amsterdam in the Spring of 2022. Her research investigates how the Swiss state governed and administered families, parents and their children through the measure of child placements. Through a focus on the underlying intersecting categorisations she analyses the power relations that become effective within and through child placements.
Email: Mira.Ducommun@phbern.ch
Mira Ducommun
Susan Diepenmaat
Susan Diepenmaat is a Master’s student in Medical Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests centre around processes of (non-normative) family making that go beyond the biological, and how those relate to socio-cultural notions of gender and sexuality.
Previously, she has researched intercultural social care relating unintended pregnancies and adoption in The Netherlands. In the Strange( r) Families Project, she will work with Saskia Bonjour to explore if and how lawyers contest what is understood as ‘family’ in their work and in Dutch Immigration Law.
Email: susan.diepenmaat@student.uva.nl