Within the Erasmus Initiative, scholars from a wide range of disciplines collaborate on research into urban life and the city. The initiative unfolds in three phases, with different researchers contributing in diverse roles throughout its development.
Below you will find an overview of all the researchers who have been involved over the years.
Theme Leads Phase 2
Dr. Isabel AwadTheme Lead Inclusive Cities & Citizens
Isabel Awad is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication. Paying close attention to local histories, actors, and politics, her work underscores the key role of communication in sustaining and challenging social inequalities. Isabel is the academic coordinator of the ‘Media, Culture and Society’ Master program.
Dr. Jiska EngelbertTheme Lead Smart Cities & Communities
Dr. Jiska Engelbert is Assistant Professor at the Erasmus School of History, Culture & Communication. In addition to coordinating both Digital Cities & CommunitiesOpens external and the new LDE Minor “Smart and Shared Cities”, Jiska is Academic Director of “Tackling Inequalities”, the first interdisciplinary Honours Programme for all Master students at the Erasmus University.
Dr. Jan FransenTheme Lead Smart Cities & Communities & Theme Lead Resilient Communities
Jan Fransen (PhD and MA in Development Studies) is an expert on urban economic development and resilience at the Institute of Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS). He is a visiting researcher on urban resilience at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS). Jan has over 25 years of experience in small business development, smart cities, resilient communities, poverty reduction and innovation in emerging economies.
Dr. Maria SchillerTheme Lead Inclusive Cities & Citizens
Maria Schiller is an Assistant Professor for Public Policy, Migration and Diversity. Often comparative, her research investigates local responses to migration, focusing on governance relationships, municipal administrations and bureaucratic practice. Maria coordinates the LDE-Master program 'Governance of Migration and Diversity'.
Dr. Annabel VreekerTheme Lead Resilient Cities and People
Annabel Vreeker is Assistant Professor of Orthopedagogy. Her research focuses on understanding and improving resilience and mental well-being of vulnerable young people. Annabel is currently working on several projects using eHealth applications to optimize the well-being and mental health of young people.
Researchers Phase 2
Dr. Salomey Gyamfi AfrifaPostdoc project - Bottom-up practices and resilience strategies in informal settlements
Dr. Clair EnthovenPostdoc project - Growing up in poversty
Dr. Carel-Peter van ErpecumPostdoc project - 30km/h speed limits for healthy populations and vital cities
Dr. Kjell NoordzijPostdoc project - Rethinking inclusive sustainability
Dr. Erwin van TuijlPostdoc project - The installer in the post-industrial city
Dr. Vivian VisserPostdoc project - One size doesn’t fit all
Dr. Laura WesterveenPostdoc project - Doing diversity
Drs. Naomi RommensPhD project – Critical placemaking against fragmentation
Prof. Dr. Julia WittmayerPrevious Theme Lead Just Sustainable Cities
PhD Candidates Phase 1
Dr. Femke VandenbergPhD - The aesthetic dispositions of popular music consumers
Vandenberg’s PhD project investigates the consumption of popular music in the Netherlands, with a focus on the audiences of nationally produced music. The project includes research topics such as cultural taste patterns, social class, social inequality, and the demonstration of nationalism through cultural consumption. Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication
Dr. Jasmin SeijbelPhD - Anti-Semitism and Football Supporters in the 21st Century
Seijbels PhD project involves educational programmes to prevent anti-Semitism in football stadiums. Jasmin collaborates with major stakeholders in the field, including the Fancoach project of Feyenoord and the Anne Frank House.
Karen Klijnhout MScPhD candidate - Competing conceptions of city culture and cultural diversity
Klijnhouts PhD project studies the urban cultural public sphere, examining the connection between city culture and cultural diversity. The main questions of this study are: how are conceptions about city culture and cultural diversity combined in discourses and how do these discourses sustain or challenge the boundaries of the established, publicly supported urban arts and culture scene?
Dr. Maja HertoghsPhD - Politics of (in)hospitality: queer tourists and queer refugees
The PhD project of Maja Hertoghs focused on suspicion and affect in the closed world of the asylum procedure. This project extended into her postdoc research, in which focus lies on the contrasting ways in which queer tourists and (illegalized) queer refugees are ‘welcomed’ in cities branded as gay-paradise.
Dr. Miranda Lutz-LandesbergenPhD - Social stress, self-regulation and antisocial behaviour development
The PhD project of Miranda C. Lutz examines the role of social stressors affecting the regulation of behaviour in children and adolescents. The goal is to answer whether deficits in the underlying mechanisms of self-regulation such as cognitive control lead to defiant social behaviour and determine how social stressors influence this relationship.
Dr. Tessa VisserPhD Project - Talented Urban Youth
The PhD project of Tessa Visser focuses on cultural and diversity and the transition from primary school to secondary school. Both qualitative and quantitative data are combined in a longitudinal effect study of an extracurricular intervention in primary school. Research topics include self-efficacy, parental involvement, and sense of belongingness.
Dr. Willemijn BezemerPhD project - In search of trust: understanding and improving
The goal of the PhD project of Bezemer is to analyse the effectiveness of different policing strategies that are aimed to increase mutual trust between the police officer and the public.
Zouhair Hammana, MSc.PhD project - Secondary education teachers’ and students’ engagement with cultural diversity
Hammana focuses on the engagement of secondary education teachers with students who have a cultural diverse background and vice versa. The study examines how teachers and students engage with the cultural ‘Other’, how they perceive themselves in relation to the cultural ‘Other’ and what kind of practices of openness they apply towards the ‘Other’.
Dr. Emily MannheimerPhD project - Imagining the Divided City
The PhD project of Emily Mannheimer examines how local tourism producers (primarily tour guides) are using tourism to redefine the image of Northern Ireland for a global audience. The project includes research topics such as tourism, identity, heritage, and post-conflict narratives.
Dr. Jaffer Latief NajarPhD project - Locating marginalized voices in human trafficking discourse: Learning from the experiences of urban subalterns in India
Dr. Mausumi ChetiaPhD project - Human security in everyday lives of disaster-displaced people in India
Through her research, Mausumi explores the everyday lives of families that face protracted internal displacement due to the disaster of riverbank erosion, in Assam, India. Among others, the research closely engages with topics such as ideas of home, urban governance, human security, discursive politics and so forth. Long-term ethnographic fieldwork forms a core of the research design and methodology.
Dr. Saba Al KuntarPhD project - Refugee Entrepreneurship and Networking in Precarity
The PhD project of Saba Al Kuntar focuses on refugee entrepreneurship through the case study of Syrian entrepreneurs in Lebanon. The research explores the experience of refugee entrepreneurs in setting up businesses amid uncertain conditions. The project includes topics such as refugee urban economy, social networks, self-reliance approach.
Dr. Warsha JagroepPhD project - Age-friendly communities for older migrants in the Netherlands
The PhD project of Warsha Jagroep focuses on older individuals with a migration background and the influence of neighbourhood attributes on their physical and social well-being. The results can provide the ingredients for designing and testing a multicomponent intervention, based on behavioural insights, that aims to increase older migrants’ well-being.
Dr. Donna de MaatPhD project - Resilience to early family stress
In this PhD project, de Maat examines resilience factors in children exposed to early family stress, such as socio-economic disadvantages or negative life events. The researchers aim to unravel why some children develop problems, while others keep functioning well and show ‘resilience’, after exposure to stressful family life.
Anne van Eldik MSc MAPhD candidate - Urban Media Engagement
The PhD project of Anne van Eldik focuses on the social media use of young people in super-diverse cities and investigates how this is related to the construction and negotiation of their urban identity. The project includes research topics such as urban identity, social media engagement, social media influencers, and the super-diverse city.
Dr. Arnout BootPhD project - Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Social-media Usage
The PhD project of Arnout Boot focuses on the cognitive and linguistic impact of social media. Research topics include (but not limited to) social-media usage, online language production, text mining, text analysis, information processing, fake news, opinion formation, memory, attention, and perception.
Dr. Lise ZurnéPhD project - Performing sensitive pasts: Exploring historical reenactments in Europe and Indonesia
Lise Zurné’s PhD project focusses on the popular phenomena of historical re-enactments. It aims to explore how re-enactors engage and negotiate sensitive histories. In her research Lise particularly focusses on 20st century violence in Europe and Indonesia. The aim of the study is to understand the relationship between re-enactments and urban history.
Mariana Fried MSc MAPhD project - Beyond the Silicon Valley story
The PhD project of Mariana Fried examines how the cities of Rotterdam and Córdoba are represented as smart and innovative and how these discourses are reinterpreted and re-produced by local urban innovation workers in both cities. The project takes an ethnographic and multi-sited approach, covering topics such as the provincialization of the smart city, agency and discursive practices, and labor in the smart city.
Dr. Shirley NieuwlandPhD project - Urban Tourism: Towards Sustainable Development Models
The PhD project of Shirley Nieuwland focuses on exploring sustainable urban tourism models in post-industrial cities that have seen a recent growth in tourism, like Rotterdam and Valencia. The project includes topics such as urban development, (urban) tourism, the sharing economy, the creative city and gentrification.
Vatan Huzeir MScPhD project - Climate change activism
Huzeir researches urban climate activists' critical discourse on relationships between climate change and social order in northwestern Europe.
Dr. Otieno Ong’ayoPostdoc project - Transnational political engagement of African Diaspora communities
Dr. Otieno Ong'ayo's research examines how Diaspora communities have (self-) organized transnationally between the country of residence and various countries of origin in order to influence local policies. The research seeks to understand diaspora transnationalism (collective organizing, practices, diaspora civic agency and political remittances) and generated social transformation.
Dr. Cathy WilcockPostdoc project - Straight outta Khartoum: Citizenship, migration and Sudan’s global music scene
Taking Sudan as a case study, this Postdoc project analyses the global reach of Khartoum’s music scene which includes numerous exiled artists in diaspora communities around the world. To what extent, in what ways, and with what effects are these globally mobile musicians contributing to the new forms of citizenship and political practices being produced during the revolution in Sudan?- Dr. Donna de Maat
PhD project - Resilience to early family stress -
Donna de Maat examines resilience factors in children exposed to early family stress, such as socio-economic disadvantages or negative life events. The researchers aim to unravel why some children develop problems, while others keep functioning well and show ‘resilience’, after exposure to stressful family life.
VCC collaborators
Dr. Amanda Alencar (Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication) Associate Professor – Refugee settlement, place-making and digital technologies
The research project of Dr. Amanda Alencar focuses on how digital technologies can be effectively and creatively employed by refugee and host community actors to enhance social inclusion in the cities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Her project was awarded the Stichting Erasmus Trustfonds. Amanda also coordinates a digital training programme for students with a refugee background as part of their preparatory 1-year program at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Dr. Asya Pisarevskaya (Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences) Postdoctoral researcher - Cities of Migration
The Postdoc project of Asya Pisarevskaya, Peter Scholten and Zeynep Kasli studies how migration-related diversity is manifested and governed on the local level. They examine the underlying mechanisms of this relationship. The researchers aim to write a book with the case studies of cities for each of the determined types of urban diversity.
Dr. Warda Belabas (Erasmus School of Social and Behavourial Sciences) Assistant professor - Diversity, inclusion, identity and policy
Dr. Warda Belabas is an Assistant Professor within DPAS. Her research touches on issues of diversity, inclusion, identity and policy. From 2014-2020, she also served as a senior network officer for the academic network IMISCOE. Her work touches on the practice of local governance, and therefore she collaborates with the cities of Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Antwerp in particular in her city branding research.
Dr. Zeynep Kasli (Academic Researcher Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences) - Cities of Migration
The project of Asya Pisarevskaya, Peter Scholten and Zeynep Kasli studies how migration-related diversity is manifested and governed on the local level. They examine the underlying mechanisms of this relationship. The researchers aim to write a book with the case studies of cities for each of the determined types of urban diversity.
Dr. ir. Beitske Boonstra (Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences) - Community-led initiatives, the commons and city-making practices
Dr.ir. Beitske Boonstra is Academic Researcher at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences. Her research focusses on community-led initiatives and the commons, city-making practices, boundary spanning skills and urban governance capacities, through a theoretical lens of self-organization, complexity and resilience. She is coordinator of the Kenniswerkplaats Leefbare Wijken Rotterdam.
Dr. Amanda Brandellero (Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication) Assistant Professor- Crafting future urban economies
Dr. Amanda Brandellero researches urban creativity and heritage. Her project 'Crafting future urban economies' was awarded an NWO VIDI grant. The project focuses on how making and crafts can support the transition to more circular urban economies. Amanda also participates in the LDE Port City & Region Futures programme.
Dr. Arno van der Hoeven (Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication) Assistant professor - Live music and urban development
Arno van der Hoeven’s Postdoc project focuses on the economic, spatial and sociocultural impact of live music on cities. Music venues and festivals are vital for urban life. As part of the POPLIVE project, Van der Hoeven studies how local live music ecologies can be supported.
Dr. Mariangela Lavanga (Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication) Assistant Professor - Locational choices, labour market and entrepreneurship in the fashion industry
Lavanga's research focuses on locational choices, labour market and entrepreneurship of a diverse range of creative professionals (e.g. designers, craftsmen); intermediaries and temporary clusters (e.g. trade events); local and global networks; sustainability and circular economy in the fashion industry.
Dr. Robbert-Jan Adriaansen (Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication) Assistant professor - Historical Reenactments as Simulation of the Past: A New Paradigm for Research
Rather than considering historical reenactments forms of historical representation, this studies them as forms of historical simulation. Applying play theory to the study of urban historical reenactments will show dynamics of identification and meaning making otherwise uncovered by traditional approaches to historical representation.
Dr. Sven-Ove Horst (Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication) Assistant Professor - Organizing and managing the transformational dynamics in media and creative industries
Dr. Sven-Ove Horst is interested in understanding the way in which digital media, strategic management and entrepreneurship intersect in today’s conditions of rapid organizational and societal change. This knowledge can help individual entrepreneurs become more reflective of their own branding; it can help media organizations to create sensible strategies; and it can help to ensure more creative and sustainable societal developments.