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The grant will support a one-day conference that will bring together UU academics and those from Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and countries along the so-called “Balkan route,” as well as academics working on mass displacement, war and violence, to assess the EU-Turkey deal as a policy, as a practice, and as a political project. Cobbled together amid the so called “refugee crisis,” the deal reflected not only an attempt to define EU policy on asylum seeking, but also the politics of EU borders in a political context of rising xenophobia within Europe. The conference will examine developments in Turkey in the wake of the deal, including new institutions put in place for refugee integration; developments in border countries, including the asylum application process; the changing politics of asylum reception in these countries; the business of human smuggling; and recent research on the future desires of refugees themselves.

Team members:
Prof. Rebecca Bryant (Anthropology), Dr. David Henig (Anthropology), Prof. Dina Siegel-Rozenblit (Criminology), Prof. Ajay Bailey (International Development Studies-Human Geography), and Prof. Ismee Tames (History and Art History/NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies)

Bridging the interdisciplinary fields of critical development and migration studies, the project involves the organization of a PhD school on the relations between migration and translocal sustainable development challenges and opportunities in origin and host societies. There is a special emphasis on the immigration of non-EU nationals in shrinking EU regions.

Team members:
Dr. Alberto Alonso-Fradejas. Postdoctoral researcher. International Development Studies Group, Human Geography and Planning Department (SGPL), Faculty of Geosciences; Dr. Bianca Szytniewski. Assistant Professor, Education Group. SGPL, Geosciences; Dr. Marlies Meijer, Assistant Professor, Planning Group. SGPL, Geosciences

The Seed Fund will allow me to write a project proposal on what I call the “honeymoon effect”. It refers to the idea that migrants and refugees are motivated and stimulated to build a life and integrate into the destination country; but over time due to a variety of reasons this positive tendency may fade away. The project will identify conditions under which the “honeymoon effect” diminishes, draw attention to the importance of a long-term policy approach to integration policies and provide recommendations to improve the experiences of diverse group of migrants and refugees.

Team members:
Özge Bilgili, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science; Advisory team: Ali Albert Salah, Professor of Social and Affective Computing at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences; Maggi Leung, Associate Professor of Human Geography and Planning

Across Europe, descendants of migrants are considering migrating to the country of their parents’ birth. This raises questions about feelings and politics of belonging, particularly in a period of rising populism in many countries. With the seed money we aim to work towards a study that provides insight into the complexities and dynamisms influencing the multiple belongings of second and third generation Turkish migrants in the Netherlands and Germany and how they are shaping their aspirations to emigrate or stay within the changing local, national and transnational contexts.

Team members:
dr. Kirsten Visser, Department of Human Geography and Spatial, Planning, UU, dr. Gideon Bolt, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, UU, dr. Ilse van Liempt, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, UU

COVID examines prejudice, stigma, discrimination that is practiced on and resisted by people of Asian appearance in Europe during the Corona pandemic. Using a participatory and action-oriented approach, COVID also explores and co-creates new openings brought by the pandemic. In particular, the role of artistic expression and social media as spaces of protest and alliance-building will be studied and fostered.

Team members:
Maggi Leung, Associate Professor, Human Geography & Spatial Planning (Geosciences); Rick Dolphijn, Associate Professor, Media and Culture Studies (Humanities); Özge Bilgili, Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Social Science (Social Sciences)

This project addresses a constant dilemma of migration studies in the humanities: they are inevitably bound to the social and to the epistemic frameworks of our academic disciplines – even if these disciplines themselves become affected by migration and exile. Our academic gaze towards migration thus runs the risk to remain attached to an institutionalized perspective that tends to focus on the kind of ‘globalization from above’ (Hall) which is connected to affirmative notions of academic mobility. We thus want to challenge the paradigms and practices of academic knowledge by considering migration as a destabilizing, but also epistemically productive category (Bal and Hernandez) at the intersections of material, visual and intellectual practices of knowledge-making.

Team members:
Main applicant: Prof. Dr. Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Professor for Modern and Contemporary Art History; Cooperation partners, Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��: Prof. Dr. Birgit Meyer, Professor of Religious Studies; Dr. Pooyan Tamimi Arab, UD in Religious Studies; Dr. Mary Bouquet, UHD and Fellow for the Art History and Museum Studies Track at Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� College; External cooperation partners: Dr. Costanza Caraffa, Head of the Photothek, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence – Max Planck Institute; Anna Sophia Messner M.A., Research Assistant and PhD candidate, LMU Munich

This project will focus on the gender-specific ethnic stereotypes that drive employers' discriminatory behaviour in the labour market, as well as on the identity management and job search strategies employed by job seekers to avoid discrimination. It will draw on insights from sociology, social psychology and organizational science, and adopt an intersectional perspective and a methodologically innovative research design, combining vignette studies and an original survey.

Team members:
Dr. Valentina Di Stasio, ERCOMER/ASW; v.distasio@uu.nl (sociology), in collaboration with: Dr. Susanne Veit, Deutsche Zentrum für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung (DeZIM) and WZB Berlin Social Science Centre (social psychology), Dr. Bram Lancee, ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Amsterdam (sociology)

The project will investigate the social epistemology of conspiracy theories and their embedding and growing popularity in the public discourse of Western societies and within migrant communities. We will advance the epistemological analysis of conspiracy theories by applying the analytic tools of social epistemology and computational sociology that were developed in order to analyse the social-epistemic mechanisms of belief formation in groups. This will help us to understand why conspiracy theories gain popularity as well as how we can develop strategies to rebut them.

Team members:
Daniel Cohnitz (Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies), Tobias Stark (Assistant Professor, Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science, ERCOMER), Erik Stei (Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies)