PEOPLE
This project uniquely brings together academics who are located in 4 different Belgian universities and academic centres. A team of supervisors, advisors and researchers working at:
- The Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy , the Migration Law Research Group of the Faculty of Law and Criminology, and the Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR), of Gent University.
- The Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Democracy, Institutions and Subjectivity, and METROLAB, of the Université Catholique de Louvain.
- The Centre for Family Studies, of the Odisee University College
- The Department of Architecture, of KU Leuven
Discover the REFUFAM team
Principal Investigator (PI)
Email: [email protected]
Supervisors
Ellen Desmet is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of Ghent University, Belgium. As the first holder of the chair in migration law, she founded the Migration Law Research Group (MigrLaw). Her research is situated at the intersection of migration law, human rights and legal anthropology. She teaches migration law and ‘Law and Society’, and coordinates the migration law component of the Human Rights and Migration Law Clinic.
She is chair of Nansen (the Belgian Refugee Council), co-supervisor-spokesperson of the Human Rights Research Network (HRRN), and member of the steering board of the Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR).
Ellen Desmet complemented her law studies (KU Leuven) with a master in Cultures and Development Studies (KU Leuven) and a master in Development Cooperation (Ghent University). She holds a PhD in Law from the KU Leuven (2010) and previously held positions at the Children’s Rights Knowledge Centre, the Law and Development Research Group of the University of Antwerp and the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University.
Email: [email protected]
Luce Beeckmans is a BOFZAP-research professor at the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, KU Leuven University.
Studying the materialities and spatialities of trans-national migration (particularly from sub-Saharan Africa) at multiple spatial scales, her research is situated at the intersection of migration, city and architecture.
More specifically she focuses on the housing and home-making of refugees and migrants, while linking it to broader debates on urban diversity and inclusion.
In her interdisciplinary research, she combines insights and methods from different (and traditionally quite separate) realms, including urban/architectural theory and design; urban ethnography; human geography, as well as post-colonial studies, de-colonial theory and critical, intersectional and feminist thought. She is also interested in rethinking research methods and has been exploring new ways of data visualization, as well as new practices of counter-mapping and architectural ethnography.
Apart from being involved in REFUFAM, Luce Beeckmans is currently also a partner in a Horizon2020-project (ReROOT: Arrival infrastructures as sites of integration for recent newcomers), a Innoviris-project (ATLAS (Access To sheLter And Social infrastructure), an FWO-project (Housing for Refugee Inclusion: exploring inclusive housing design and housing governance models) and an action research project for Globe Aroma in Brussels.
Email: [email protected]
Dirk Geldof is professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Design Sciences of the University of Antwerp. He is senior Researcher at the Centre of Family Studies of the Odisee University of Applied Sciences Brussels. His research focus is on superdiversity, migration and the integration of asylum seekers in Belgium.
He is promotor of an AMIF-research project on the living conditions of children and families in collective refugee centers in Belgium (2020-2025). He is co-promotor of REFUFAM work package 2 on the psychosocial wellbeing of refugees.
Email: [email protected]
Mathieu Berger is an Associate Professor of sociology at UCLouvain, where he teaches urban sociology, theories of public space, social semiotics and qualitative research methods. He is a research fellow at CriDIS (Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires Démocratie, Institutions, Subjectivité) and a research affiliate at EHESS Paris (CEMS – Centre d’études des mouvements sociaux) and at EPFL Lausanne (LASUR – Laboratoire de sociologie urbaine). His research deals, on one hand, with democratic public spaces and political participation, and on the other, with social aspects of city planning and urban policies in Europe and the US. Mathieu is also the general coordinator of Metrolab (UCLouvain-ULB), a laboratory of applied urban research based in Brussels and funded by the European Regional Development Fund, which is one of the partners of the REFUFAM project.
Email: [email protected]
He is a Dr. in Political and Social Sciences, Master in Moral Philosophy, Master in Conflict and Development and Bachelor in Social Work. He conducts research on themes such as asylum, migration and integration practice- and policy. And publishes on the importance of politicization and superdiversity in Flemish civil society. He is co-author of the book Social Shadow Work (Sociaal Schaduwwerk). His current research at the Center for Family Studies at Odisee University of Applied Sciences, concerns processes of family reunification of recognized refugees and subsidiary protected persons.
Email: [email protected]
Milena Belloni is Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department of the University of Antwerp, and the coordinator of MIGLOBA – the network of migration and global mobility.
Ethnographer specialized in migration and refugee studies, she has conducted extensive fieldwork in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Italy, Belgium and Holland. Her research mainly concerns refugees’ mobility dynamics and inclusion pathways, transnational refugee families, migrant smuggling, protracted displacement in Europe and in the Global South, home and housing studies, and ethnographic methods. She published in several international peer reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Refugee Studies, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Global Networks. Her monographic study on the migration of Eritreans to Europe, The Big Gamble, is published open access by the University of California Press (2019).
Email: [email protected]
Researchers
Roos-Marie van den Bogaard is a PhD candidate at Ghent University. She carries out research on the integration of refugee families in Belgium as part of the REFUFAM project, which consists of an interdisciplinary consortium. Her research is carried out under supervision of Prof. Ellen Desmet, Prof. Robin Vandevoordt and Dr. Milena Belloni.
Her research interests lay in the field of migration law, with a particular interest in socio-legal aspects of migration in the European context. Previously, Roos-Marie worked as Junior Advocacy Officer at the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM), advocating for the rights of undocumented migrants in Europe. Additionally, in her capacity as independent consultant, she conducted research on issues relating to free movement rights of mobile EU citizens. Through her volunteer work for the Dutch Refugee Council, as well as her work as Junior Program Officer on migration at Justice and Peace Netherlands, she familiarized herself more with refugee law and policy in the European context.
Email: [email protected]
Dr. Groeninck works as a senior researcher on topics of refugee families’ sense of well-being, inclusion, and precarity in Belgium. She has worked extensively both with families still awaiting the asylum procedure, as well as with families who situate themselves on their inclusion pathway after obtaining legal status. Her topics of interest include among others divers-sensitive conceptualizations of well-being and vulnerability, and of the process of re-rooting in a new context. Starting November 2023, she also coordinates a research project on people with precarious residence in Brussels. This project employs two PhD students and one postdoctoral researcher looking at scenarios to rewrite precarious citizenship in Brussels through opening up access to housing and social infrastructure. In addition, she has an extensive record in anthropological research on Islam and Muslim communities in Western Europe, more specifically in Belgium and The Netherlands. In that field she conducts research and publishes on Islamic piety, world-making, epistemology and authority formation.
Email: [email protected]
Louise Carlier is a post-doctoral researcher in sociology at UClouvain and a lecturer at Université Libre de Bruxelles. After defending her PhD on cosmopolitanism at ULB in 2015, she has been scientific coordinator of Metrolab, an interdisciplinary urban research laboratory bringing together ULB and UCL research centers. Her work combines urban sociology and the sociology of migration, based on ethnographic inquiry and an ecological and pragmatic approach considering the role of social sciences in public action. Using Brussels as her main case study, she has developed her research on relations of coexistence in urban spaces, experience of urban hospitality for newcomers, the role of social infrastructures for urban inclusion. She is currently working on the inclusion pathways of refugee families in Wallonia and Brussels, as part of the REFUFAM project.
Email: [email protected]
Layla Zibar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Architecture at KU Leuven University (Belgium). She is currently working on the inclusion pathways of refugee families and investigating possible enabling infrastructures for refugee families in Leuven as part of the REFUFAM project. Her work and research interests revolve around inclusion, forced migration, spatio-temporal sociabilities, and urbanism.
Layla has been involved as a lecturer and trainer in (post)conflict humanitarian response and post-war reconstruction for researchers and professionals from chronically conflict-affected regions in coordination with the Middle East Cooperation unit at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg (Germany). Over the years, her academic and professional interests aim to comprehend and explore the interrelations between crises, involuntary displacements, urbanization processes, homing, and lived experiences.
Layla holds a dual PhD degree in Architecture & Urbanism (2023) from BTU (DE) and KU Leuven (BE), an MSc in Urban Design, Community Development, and Architectural Engineering (Cairo University/Egypt 2016), and a BA in Architectural Engineering (Aleppo University/Syria 2010).
Email: [email protected]
Before joining Ghent University, Dr Orsini worked as postdoctoral researcher both at Essex and the Université Catholique de Louvain. Since 2015, he also teaches courses on migration, race, ethnicity and the politics of diversity at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. While Orsini’s most recent research is concerned with so-called “integration policies”, he previously conducted research unaccompanied minors’ migration and the structural violence they face along their trajectories, institutional racism within family reunification, plus a series of field investigations in key locations of Europe’s border regime. His sholarship concentrates on the (coloniality of the) everyday governance of migration and the multiplication of tangible and intangible borders of (racist) in/ex-clusion. At CESSMIR, he coordinated the ERC funded project ChildMove and is currently the coordinator of the REFUFAM project and the International Thematic Netowork on Decolonizing Education and Research on Migration (DERM)
Email: [email protected]
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Principal investigator
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The Project
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In the world of migration and integration governance, Belgium represents a strikingly complex case. Competences of migration (e.g. asylum and family reunification) and integration (e.g. education, work and housing) are divided between federal, regional and municipal governance levels, while support services are dispersed across a range of civil society organizations and state actors. Compared to neighbouring countries like the Netherlands, Germany or France, Belgium’s lack of central coordination has created substantial ‘policy gaps’. This has created both risks and opportunities: in the interstices between governments’ competences, new support practices often emerge, some of which are then (partially) transformed into formal policies. We know surprisingly little, however, about the effects of Belgium’s complex institutional configuration on the psychosocial well-being and integration trajectories of newcomers. This lack of knowledge is puzzling as integration continues to dominate public debates.
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About Us
This project uniquely brings together academics who are located in 4 different Belgian universities and academic centres. A team of supervisors, advisors and researchers working at:
About Us
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