Experts Database

Areas of expertise
- Finnish party and government politics concerning immigration & immigrants
- Immigration: post-WWII evolution at the policy, judicial, and discursive levels in Finland and Western Europe
- Populist political communication

Research
Doc. Diss.: Finnish parties and immigration issues from the 1970s to the 2010s (2014-2019)

Post doc project: Securitization in authorities’ discourse and practice: Refugee reception in Finland, 1986–1995. (2019-2020, Kone Foundation)

Graduate Student at the KTH - Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Department of Philosophy and History, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment (2015). I am part of the Marie Sklodowska Curie ITN program in Environmental Humanities ENHANCE. I am interested in working at the intersection between Environmental History, Environmental Humanities and Migration Studies, touching also upon Cultural Heritage, Memory Studies, Oral History, Psychogeography, and Political Ecology.

Currently, I am working on my doctoral thesis, which is provisionally entitled: "Coal Lives. Italians and the Metabolism of Coal in Wallonia, Belgium".

Current Research:

Dr. Anja van Heelsum is Project Coordinator of EU funded H2020 research consortium Advancing Alternative Migration Governance (See: http://admigov.eu). She's associate professor at the Department of Political Science of the University of Amsterdam, and works together with 13 partner institutes in Greece, Poland, Spain, Belgium, Denmark, Turkey, Lebanon and Ethiopia, to investigate the consequences of migration policies on the ground, with the intention to suggest alternatives.

Expertise:

Dr van Heelsum has been involved with the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies (IMES) since 1997 and is particularly fascinated by the interplay between migrants motives and migration policies. Her complete personal website provides more info and papers online. With a broad experience as a migration scholar, she worked on a variety of subject, including: migrants aspirations, the refugee “crisis”, refugee reception, local policies on immigrants, ethnicity, political participation of immigrants, migrant organisations, and Islam. Regional specialisations are: the Mediterranean area (Spain, Greece, Turkey, Morocco) and Africa (Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia). She applies a multidisciplinary approach to migration and ethnic studies, where insights from psychology, political science, sociology and anthropology meet.

International Networks

Dr. van Heelsum has been part of many international research teams, such as the CLIP network, the EURISLAM team and currently the ADMIGOV team. She's a member of the European Network for Immigration, Integration and Social Cohesion (IMISCOE) and involved in Metropolis International, which is largest international network of researchers, policy makers, and community groups engaged in identifying, understanding, and responding to developments in migration and diversity. For her sabatics she was a visiting researcher in Rabat (Morocco) and Ethiopia (University of Mek'ele and Addis Abeba). Also, she is board member of the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Teaching and PhD supervision (2019)

Dr. van Heelsum had set up and is the coordinator of the Minor “Global Migration”, a bachelor program that provides students with fundamental understanding of processes, causes and impacts of migration. Her course is on Migrants Motives and Migration Policy;
She is also involved in thesis supervision within the Research Project Conflict Studies and Governance;
In the past she taught several other subjects.
She is a PhD supervisor in the ADMIGOV project.

Publications

For a full list, see the TAB Publications below, , and for h-index click here. Favorites:

Heelsum, A. van (2016) 'Why migration will continue: aspirations and capabilities of Syrians and Ethiopians with different educational backgrounds', Ethnic and Racial Studies 39(9) 3001-3009.
Kassaye, A., Ashur, I., & van Heelsum, A. (2016) 'The relationship between media discourses and experiences of belonging: Dutch Somali perspectives'. Ethnicities, 16(6), 773-797. DOI: 10.1177/1468796816653627
Heelsum, A. van (2017) 'Aspirations and Frustrations experiences of recent refugees in the Netherlands', Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(13) 2137-2150. DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1343486