Team

Our team

project coordination

Erasmus University Rotterdam

URBIMM is coordinated by dr. Thomas Swerts (PI) and embedded in the Team Policy, Politics and Society (PPS) of the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands). The PPS team’s mission is to focus on the many aspects of the interplay of society, politics and policy on and across various levels of policy making (local, national, EU, international) in times of globalization. The team covers the whole policy cycle ranging from questions such as how civil society actors impact government agenda setting and policymaking to the impact of policies on various groups in society. The URBIMM project will contribute to and rely on the available expertise within the team regarding international comparative research and methodological approaches for securing the participation and inclusion of stakeholders in the research process. The URBIMM project also connects to a wider inter-disciplinary network of migration scholars via the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre Governance of Migration and Diversity (LDE GMD).

Research team

Dr. Thomas Swerts

Principal Investigator

Dr. Thomas Swerts

Principal Investigator

Dr. Thomas Swerts is Assistant Professor in Urban Sociology at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Before, he worked at the universities of Chicago (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2014), Leuven, Liège and Antwerp. At the Erasmus University Rotterdam, he is a member of the Team Policy, Politics and Society and coordinates the Sociology Master Track Metropolitan Issues and Policy. He is an affiliated researcher at the LDE Center of Governance of Migration and Diversity and the LDE Center for BOLD Cities.

His research focuses on the nexus between urban studies and migration studies. As a researcher, he is primarily specialized in ethnographic methods, participatory action research and in-depth interviewing. His book project, 'Citizen X: Becoming Undocumented Activists On Both Sides Of The Atlantic’, is a transatlantic ethnographic study that compares how undocumented youth in Chicago and the sans-papiers in Brussels became political activists.

He has received research grants by the SSRC, NSF, Mellon Foundation and the NWO. He has published in academic journals like Global Networks, Mobilization, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Antipode, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and contributed to edited volumes on citizenship studies and immigrant rights mobilization.

As the main coordinator of the NWO Vidi Project URBIMM (URBan migration infrastructures for Irregular Migrant Mobility, 2024-2029), he and his research team will investigate in the next five years how migration infrastructures locally facilitate the arrival, transit, settlement and exit of undocumented migrants in European cities.

Email: swerts@essb.eur.nl

Prof. dr. Godfried Engbersen

Professor of General Sociology

Prof. dr. Godfried Engbersen

Professor of General Sociology

Prof. dr. Godfried Engbersen is full professor of General Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Before, he worked at the universities of Leiden (Ph.D. University of Leiden, 1990), Amsterdam and Utrecht, and as a visiting professor at the Centre of Western European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (spring 1996). He is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences (KNAW).

His work focuses on social inequality and international migration. His background is sociology, but he has always been inspired by insights from other disciplines, including anthropology, criminology, human geography, and public administration. He tries to combine professional sociology with policy sociology and public sociology.

During his scientific career, he advised and conducted research for national governments, large and small municipalities, and international organizations. He has been a SOPEMI correspondent for the OECD and an elected member of the Dutch Advisory Council for Migration (ACVZ). In 2012, together with Erik Snel, he founded the knowledge lab for ‘Liveable neighbourhoods’ : a partnership between the city of Rotterdam and Erasmus University where local knowledge is produced and exchanged. And in 2014, he became an elected member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy.

Email:engbersen@essb.eur.nl

Hannah Kay, MSc.

PhD Candidate

Hannah Kay, MSc.

PhD Candidate

Hannah holds a Bachelor of Science in Human Geography and Urban Planning, a Master of Science in Sociology with a specialization in Migration and Ethnic Studies, and a Master of Arts in African Studies.

In her previous work experiences, Hannah has dealt with different aspects of migration and the wider political and social questions it raises at different levels (local, national, international, etc.): she has conducted desk research for the documentary “Fortuyn: Un Dutch” produced by mint film office, worked as a research intern at the Dutch National Contact Point of the European Migration Network (EMN NL) and at a Senegalese NGO (DIADEM) working on migrants’ rights, and finally, as a trainee in the European Affairs Program at the Egmont - Royal Institute for International Relations.

In the past, her own research projects have conversely focused on disentangling what Senegalese artists constitute as migration, as well as on internal bordering practices and state migration infrastructures from the perspective of social movements in the Netherlands. Her current doctoral research, on the other hand, brings together her academic and personal backgrounds by focusing on the dynamics at play between illegalized migrants and urban migration infrastructures in the cities of Brussels (the capital of Belgium) and Trieste (the capital of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region in north-eastern Italy).

Email:kay@essb.eur.nl

Carola Vasileiadi, MSc.

PhD Candidate

Carola Vasileiadi, MSc.

PhD Candidate

Carola is an interdisciplinary social scientist working as a PhD candidate on the URBIMM project in Rotterdam and Thessaloniki.

After graduating from the master’s program Urban Geography at Utrecht University in 2021, Carola contributed to the organization of the HERA conference in Amsterdam about Refugee Youth, Public Space and Artistic Practices in collaboration with artistic and local institutions in the city. Thereafter, she started working for the municipality on urban development projects. Meanwhile, she participated in conferences to present her master thesis on Artistic Practices of Undocumented Migrants and their construction of Place- and Political Belonging for which she received the master thesis award within the Focus Area Migration and Societal Change. She worked as a junior researcher at the Utrecht Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning on the I-CLAIM project investigating the living and working conditions of migrant households with precarious legal status in Europe.

Carola is interested in creative ethnographic methods to shed light on experiences of marginalized groups that potentially counteract exclusionary discourses and policies. By doing ethnographic research in Thessaloniki, a transit city in the north of Greece for people on the move, she aims to contribute to an understanding of their everyday lived experiences in the city. Through URBIMM, she opts to improve local policies and service provision towards undocumented migrants.

Email:vasileiadi@essb.eur.nl

stakeholders

Project partners

In the first phase of the research, we will establish stakeholder networks in Brussels, Rotterdam, Trieste, and Thessaloniki that will remain actively involved in the research for the duration of the project. Once these networks are established, information about collaborating partners will be made publicly available here.