Anja van Heelsum is an associate professor at the Department of Political Sciences and currently publishing about her EU-funded H2020 research project Advancing Alternative Migration Governance (AdMiGov), where she was the PI. Fieldwork took place from 2019 to 2023 with partner institutes in Greece, Poland, Spain, Belgium, Denmark, Turkey, Lebanon and Ethiopia, and the consequences of migration policies on the ground were studied.
She is particularly fascinated by the interplay between migrants' motives and migration policies. With broad experience as a migration scholar and a teacher of conflict studies, she worked on a variety of subjects, keywords including migrants' aspirations, the refugee ‘crisis’, refugee reception, local policies on immigrants, ethnicity, political participation of immigrants, migrant organisations, and Islam. She is also an expert on Ethiopia. For more info on these themes see her personal website.
Anja is a program group leader of Challenges of Democratic Representation in her department, a board member the Amsterdam Research Centre on Migration (ARC-M), IMISCOE, and of the journals Ethnic and Racial Studies (ERS until recently) and PanAfrican Journal of Governance and Development (PJGD, current).
Her teaching in 2023/2024 includes the supervision of PhD students, the coordination of the Minor Global Migration, and she teaches the BA course Migrants’ Motives and Migration Policy and the MA thesis project on Conflict Resolution and Governance.