Tag: Prof. Huib Ernste

Posted on

PhD Defence by Veronica Pastorino

On Monday, Nov. 24, 2025, Veronica Pastorino successfully defended her PhD Thesis entitled: “Spatial Citizenship. Understanding the challenges and redefinitions of contemporary social cohesion through the analysis of the geographies of post-migrant contentious politics” (click on cover page to download full text). Through this defence, she did not just earn the PhD title from the Radboud University in Nijmegen, but also from the University of Bologna, as part of the Double Degree Programme between both Universities.

The long title of this PhD thesis reflects the ambitious and complex setup of the underlying PhD research, which might need some clarification:

The PhD Thesis focuses on how second-generation youngsters with a migration background, also called ‘migrants’ descendants’, gain citizenship in their new home country. Following the seminal work of the Citizenship scholar Engin Isin, Veronica suggests that this is much more than just a formality. It is not so much related to their judicial status, although,that is of course also part of it, but more related to becoming a full-fledged member of the host society and community, as well as to how others recognise them as such. It is much more a multiscalar ‘practice’ and a ‘process’. Citizenship emerges out of what political actors and ‘citizens’ do… This already makes it clear that it is not just an issue of nationality or of the nation-state, but also of the local and regional communities in which they are active. This brings in the dimension of space (or place). Identification with and belonging to a specific place can occur at different spatial scale levels. The way one might gain this kind of ‘citizenship’ can also vary from one place to another.

Veronica investigated the processes of how these youngsters gain citizenship in their new home surroundings in two different countries, Germany and Italy. In both countries, she looked at specific social movements, or one could roughly also say: specific ‘NGO’s’, which intend to support these youngsters in gaining citizenship. These social movements in both countries operate on a national as well as on a regional/local level, reflecting also the different spatial scale levels of identification, belonging and (social) cohesion.

To conceptualise the complex spatiality of these processes, Veronica adopts and adapts the triad coined by Henri Lefebvre comprising Perceived Space (the more material and physical characteristics of space), Conceived Space (the conceptual and mental transposition of space) and Lived Space (the embodied and personally experienced aspects of space).

So Veronica tried to grasp the complexity of gaining citizenship based on individual and social actions, as well as on the individual and collective activities of these different social movements operating in different national and societal and political contexts.

Gaining citizenship is not an easy thing, and goes along with resistance and conflict and therefore can be described as a real ‘struggle’. This also demands critical reflection on how this actually takes place and might be improved. If it utterly looks as if it occurs smoothly and peacefully, there would be no reason to seek alternative ways of dealing with it, even though the underlying problems might still be there. Veronica, therefore, also concludes that some degree of irritation and conflict is actually needed to make critical reflection on these processes and ‘learning’ from errors effective.

In this way, her research attempts to contribute to societal and political debates as well as to scientific debates in the fields of European Postmigration Studies, Social Movement Studies and Citizenship Studies by adding a critical spatial lens to it.

  

Posted on

PhD Defence by Joren Jacobs

The Netherlands are renowned because of their Spatial Planning and their institutionalised System of Spatial Planning. Something many Spatial Planners in the Netherlands are very proud of. This does not make them the most critical or progressive branch in Dutch governance. On the other hand, in the last decade, the actual practice of spatial planning in the Netherlands has changed quite a bit. Under the influence of the changing political climate, austerity programmes in the disguise of decentralisation to provincial and municipal levels of governance, Spatial Planning was increasingly marginalised and suffering from a lack of resources and of effective instruments. In practice, Spatial Planners were struggling to find new ways and alternative modes to ‘do’ Spatial Planning. One might say that this enforced a certain dynamics or ‘progressiveness’ in Spatial planning. In an earlier PhD thesis I supervised on ‘informality in Spatial Planning’ and in another blogpost on the ‘Culture of Spatial Planning’, this was also addressed.

In this respect, it is refreshing to view Spatial Planning and its dynamics from a totally different perspective, in which not only the spatial setting and the object of spatial planning are problematised but also the practice and institutional setting, as well as the self-awareness and ‘identity’ of Spatial Planning itself are rethought.

This is exactly what Dr Joren Jacobs did in his PhD Thesis on Cross-border Spatial Planning in World Society. A systems-theoretical perspective (Click on the Image of the Cover to download the full text).
While strictly sticking to the System Theoretic perspective of Niklas Luhmann (for a brief introduction in Luhmann’s Systems Theory, see this brief video) Joren shows how a System of Cross-Border Spatial Planning does not easily evolve and needs to deal with the (new) limitations and opportunities of boundaries to be effective while causing the whole System of Spatial Planning to change and adapt and to re-define itself.  Looking less at the strategic actions of decision makers or planners but rather at the inherent logics of systemic dynamics and interactions between different subsystems, it shows new avenues of how cross-border landscapes and interactions take shape. This new theoretical conceptualisation of (cross-border) Spatial Planning links nicely to Complexity Theories and Assemblage Theories of Spatial Planning, even though in specific aspects it is also radically different.

On Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025, Joren Jacobs, supported by his Paranymphs, Dr Daan Boezeman and Dr Henk-Jan Kooij, successfully defended his PhD thesis before a panel of five distinguished examinors consisting of Prof. Sander Meijerink, Prof. Marc Redepenning, Prof. Angelique Chettiparamb, Prof Raoul Beune and Assoc. Prof. Martijn Duineveld.

 

 

Posted on

PhD Defence Iris Poelen

Within one week two PhD candidates defended their PhD Thesis on topical issues related to Migration, Citizenship, Integration and ‘Homemaking’. On Friday, February 14 it was the turn of Iris Poelen.

She successfully defended her PhD thesis ‘Home in Displacement. Syrian and Eritrean women’s negotiations of home in the Dutch nation-space’ in front of a panel of very renowned experts in this specific field consisting of Dr Rianne van Melik (Radboud University Nijmegen), Prof.  Betty de Hart (Free University Amsterdam), Prof. Paolo Boccagni (Università di Trento, Italy), Dr Ilse van Liempt (University of Utrecht), Prof. Jan-Willem Duyvendak (University of Amsterdam). (click on picture to download full thesis)

Her thesis was supervised by Prof. Huib Ernste and Dr Lothar Smith and Dr Jana Vyrastekova.

This very clear and well-written thesis centres on the stories of forty-five Syrian and Eritrean women who have been forcibly displaced. Having fled from different ordeals relating to war and persecution, these women arrived in the Netherlands during the refugee protection crisis of 2015. As they sought to (re)make home, they worked to (re)shape their social networks, (re)create their livelihoods and pursued other personal components important for feeling at home. However, Dutch research reports showed that women held a more vulnerable societal position than men and stressed a need for more research on Syrian and Eritrean women’s experiences in the Netherlands from their own perspectives.

Theoretically, the thesis builds on scholarship that has criticised ‘integration’ as a scientific- and policy paradigm, for the integration concept wrongfully frames groups of people as external to society (Schinkel, 2018). Scholars present ‘homemaking’ as a productive alternative lens that overcomes integration’s flaws but retains its merits (Boccagni & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2023). Contrasting common notions of home as a fixed place, scholars of the ‘migration-home nexus’ (Boccagni, 2016) suggest that home can travel through time, space and scales and argue that home is best understood as a process. Homemaking furthers understanding of how people rearrange relations to prior sites of significance, while simultaneously negotiating home in present structures.

The thesis challenges the conventional understanding of displacement as an experience in which home is necessarily lost forever and underscores the relevance of multi-local and processual understandings of home. Syrian and Eritrean women who have been displaced, continuously (re)make home in the Netherlands. The thesis shows that supportive infrastructures for displaced persons could foster their comfort, by helping them (re)create roles and routines that sustain a sense of self, and by acknowledging that memories of past home places can be important for illuminating and transforming the present. However, the Dutch integration policies – with their fixed notion of home as rooted in the national territory – also further processes of ‘othering’ and protecting ‘our’ home,  inflicting great discomfort on these ‘others’ seeking new homes after displacement.

These migration-related policies may continue to affect ‘migrant’ women long after they have formally been accepted into the nation-space. Opposing the Dutch government’s aim to foster ‘migrant’ women’s ‘self-determination’, ‘a gendered politics of discomfort’ impedes these women’s pursuit of their needs and wishes in the Netherlands. Dutch immigration- and integration policies may lock women in ‘path dependencies’, reinforce their dependence on male partners, produce their ‘gender-specific guilt’, incite their ‘role-breakdown’ and inflict symbolic violence. Despite these challenges, women demonstrate their agency in (re)making home, albeit through different expressions. For younger women, the Dutch government offers important homemaking opportunities that allow them to give shape to their lives as they wish. Yet for women who already had established families and careers, but lost these important relations and roles in displacement, homemaking may instead involve a constant struggle for emplacement. The stories provided by a previously unheard group of Syrian and Eritrean women in the Netherlands illuminate how the dream of a national home can unsettle human lives.

References

Boccagni, P. (2016) Migration and the search for home: Mapping domestic space in migrants’ everyday lives. Springer, New York.

Boccagni, P. & Hondagneu‐Sotelo, P. (2023) Integration and the struggle to turn space into “our” place: Homemaking as a way beyond the stalemate of assimilationism vs transnationalism. International Migration. 61(1), 154-167.

Schinkel, W. (2018) Against ‘immigrant integration’: for an end to neocolonial knowledge production. Comparative Migration Studies. 6(1), 31.

Posted on

PhD Defence Emil van Eck

Placemaking is the central topic in geography and on this website. Places are often seen as rather stable locations. But many places are in reality vibrantly dynamic and constantly on the move. Places are not just made by their material characteristics but especially also by the events taking place there. Street Markets count to these kinds of events. There are much more dynamics and mobilities in evolved in these street markets than the temporality of the markets or the temporality of the involvement of street vendors suggests.

This is what Emil van Eck analysed in his PhD thesis, which he successfully defended on the 29th of February, 2024 . In face of a panel of prominent opponents consisting of Prof. Susan Watson (Open University, UK), Dr. Fenne Pinkster (University of Amsterdam, NL),  Prof. Stijn Oosterlynck (University of Antwerp, B), Prof. Joseph Pierce, (University of Aberdeen, Scottland), Prof. Arnoud Lagendijk (Radboud University, NL), and Prof. Ellen van Bueren (Technical University Delft, NL) and Prof. Tim Cresswell (University of Edinburgh, Scottland), the latter two as members of the special assessment committee judging the distinction, he did a more than outstanding job, which was honoured with the distinction Cum Laude. This made the full supervising (Prof. Huib Ernste, Dr Rianne van Melik, Dr Joris Schapendonk) team very proud, although it was Emil who did it… It was certainly also a product of a stimulating and inspiring academic setting in which Emil could thrive and to which he also contributed.

The title of his PhD thesis is

Public Space in Endless Motion. The politics of markets in the Netherlands.

If you click on the title image, you can download the full thesis.
Outdoor markets represent important public spaces of trade, consumption and social connections. Studies within urban geography and sociology have typically examined the social interactions between market visitors to argue about the role of public space in fostering tolerance and civic engagement. Almost all these studies focus on how such social dynamics develop within markets. This reading is the bread and butter of the politics of public space everywhere, but it also a restrictive interpretation of politics. This dissertation approaches public space politics as the broader power relations between people and institutions that involve negotiations over the terms that govern the use of and access to public space. By documenting the lives of market traders who work on two different markets in the Netherlands, this research sheds a light on the relatively hidden discursive channels, global-to-local policy circuits and mobility practices that are entangled in the politics of markets. The research findings challenge the inclusive characteristics of markets by revealing how racialised policies, multinational legislation and unequal gender relations impede access to markets for certain traders. The dissertation concludes that we need to look beyond the boundaries of public spaces to fully understand issues of inclusion, access and equality.

 

 

Posted on

PhD Defence of José Muller

The integration of refugees in host countries is not easy. There are many institutional hurdles to be overcome. There are many reasons to try to change these institutional hurdles and to create more humane policies to integrate refugees. This is of all ages and all places. Another strategy is to empower the refugees to deal with these hurdles, and to deal with all the effects these procedures have on the mental health of the refugees. One well-documented effective way to empowerment is a positive psychological attitude. However, this is a typical Western concept and one can question if this is also applicable to people from other cultural realms. Building on these ideas José Muller developed a unique new culturally sensitive intervention called MOSAIC for specifically Syrian refugees in the Netherlands, and evaluated its effects in a large field experiment allowing the refugees to develop such a positive psychological attitude. This project was a truly multidisciplinary project in which psychiatrists intensely cooperated with geographers as well as with those responsible for municipal refugee policies. This was in many respects, e.g. institutionally, culturally, and linguistically a real challenge, which José horicly mastered. She was supervised by Prof. Huib Ernste, Prof. Mario Braakman as well as Dr. Pascal Beckers

On Monday, February 26, 2024, José Muller successfully defended her PhD thesis with the title:

Unlocking the Potential of Refugees:
An intervention to foster the mental health, economic participation and social networks of Syrian refugees in the Netherlands

If you click on the title image, you can download the full thesis.

The back cover text summarises the results: The number of people worldwide who were forced to flee their homes is unprecedently high. The European Union, including the Netherlands, is an important destination for refugees. The need to facilitate the newcomers in building up their new lives in receiving societies is therefore high.

Within these receiving societies, the labour market outcomes of refugees generally lag behind those of other migrant groups and autochthones. Research shows that mental health is an important predictor in explaining this gap. Refugees frequently experience mental health problems, which hinder their chances of having paid employment. However, in the integration trajectories offered by Dutch municipalities, there is little attention to the mental health of refugees.

To fill this gap, a new intervention “Mosaic” was developed and implemented in six municipalities in the Netherlands. The intervention was developed in close collaboration with the target group -Syrian refugees- and relevant regional stakeholders. The intervention is based on positive psychology, making it the first positive psychology intervention for refugees. The aim of the intervention is to help Syrian refugees building up their new lives in the Netherlands and to help them improve their mental health, economic participation and social networks. During the implementation of the intervention, data was collected to evaluate the effect of the intervention.

This book describes the development of the intervention and the results of the effectiveness research. This book adds to the literature on positive psychology, (the development of) culturally sensitive mental health care and refugee integration. It is therefore useful for scholars, practitioners and policymakers working on these topics.

Posted on

PhD Defence of Hotmauli (Oely) Sidabalok

We are very proud to report that on Wednesday, February 8, 2023, Hotmauli (Oely) Sidabalok successfully defended her PhD thesis on “Residential Solid Waste Management in Semarang: The question of geographical environmental justice” (co-supervised by Dr Martin van der Velde and Dr Ton van Naerssen). In the fast-growing cities of Indonesia waste disposal is a serious and growing problem. Recycling is still not mainstream in most cases, and dumping solid waste at temporary or final disposal sites causes many negative impacts on the people living in the direct vicinity. These impacts vary substantially between different groups, circumstances and places and cause severe environmental justice problems. Oely has not just been investigating these issues and teaching about them at the Universitas Katolik Soegijapranata (Unika) of Semarang, in Indonesia, but also has been engaged as a (political) activist on behalf of the affected people, and has supported the local communities in organising and mobilising a broader social movement to address and solve these problems, while also taking care of her family. In between, she occasionally had to pause her research work. It, therefore, is amazing with how much perseverance she slowly but surely managed to finish her research work after almost 20 years and managed to come up with highly relevant insights into how to deal with this urging problem. An important contribution to making our places more sustainable while at the same time also an important contribution to the long-lasting partnership between the UNIKA University of Semarang and the Radboud University in Nijmegen. It is also a nice example of how more general theoretical insights in concepts of ‘spatial justice’ and ‘new social movements’ as they are developed and applied within our geography group in many fields of application, form the intellectual glue between these different fields of application in the extremely broad terrain of geographical research and feed into the continuous conversations among us (and others). In that sense, this thesis also contributes to the local ‘placemaking’ within our geography group at Radboud University.

You can download the full text of her very well-written thesis by clicking on the cover of her PhD Thesis.

Posted on

PhD Defence Henk Willems

On January 30, 2023, Henk Willems was awarded the title of Dr.

Henk Willems, started his PhD research work on Mondragon after he retired from professional life, but still felt intellectually challenged, and now at the age of 72, he bravely and successfully defended his PhD thesis on “Why did the Mondragon co-ops degenerate (or not)? Theorizing the Mondragon cooperative experience beyond the ‘degeneration thesis’ “.  The topic of his research can be traced back to the time when he graduated as a master’s student in Geography at Radboud University in 1976 when in the field of geography neo-Marxist streams of thought were the mainstream, while at the same time, the Radboud University was a stronghold in the Netherlands of the 1968 inspired democratisation movement. In these days, parts of the university were occupied by students, while geographers, who are strongly engaged with the world around them, were at frontstage on the barricades of this progressive movement. During his professional career, as a politician and policymaker, Henk Willems stayed committed to creating a better world and after retirement was very much interested in the Mondragon Experiment, for an alternative, cooperative future of capitalism. Mondragon since its foundation in the 1950s developed from a small local Basque enterprise to, nowadays, a global player and the world’s largest co-op (Romeo, 2022). The following brief video shows its origins (Click on picture of Mondragon to start video).

But is it really only a success story? or did it compromise on its own cooperative principles when it grew bigger and embedded in the global capitalist economy, in other words: “did it degenerate?” (The degeneration thesis). Henk Willems argues as a real Geographer, that the cooperative principles of Mondragon, are not just part of an abstract idealist programme, but are also directly related to the concrete, social, and spatial context they emerged from. So if it does not fully comply with the cooperative ideals, it may as well be due to an original compromise with the local political and spiritual situation of the days, when it was founded. This is also known as the ‘original sin thesis’, as the cultural psychologist, Carl Ratner (2016) calls it. In his fascinating very comprehensive theoretical and historical explorative study Henk investigates how indeed the context, time and place, did make a difference. So, places also make social movements.

 

Click on the title page to download the full PhD Thesis.

   

Ratner, C. (2016) The Politics of Cooperation and Co-ops, Forms of Cooperation and Co-ops, and the Politics that shape them. Nova Publishers, New York.

Posted on

PhD Defence of Lidya Sitohang

On Tuesday, March 22, Lidya Sitohang (Co-supervised by Dr Lothar Smith and Dr Martin van der Velde) successfully defended her PhD thesis on ‘Cross-border interaction in the context of development in the Indonesian-Malaysian border region’. A thesis in which she nicely shows, that places are more than just ‘bordered’ regions and that in these places, people are making a living and in their everyday cross-border interactions are the source for development of the region. Also, these examples of everyday border crossings show again that we as human beings are always already beyond our own borders. An issue which I regularly refer to also on this blogsite, both in theoretical and philosophical terms as well as in more empirical terms. Especially her subtitle beautifully expresses the embodiment of cross-border interaction: ‘Garuda is on my chest, but my stomach is in Malaysia’.

To quote her summary (click on picture to the right to download the full PhD Thesis): ‘This study investigates the border crossing of Krayan’s locals into Malaysia as a means of meeting their daily needs, which cannot be met in Krayan because of the poor state of development of the region. People living in the more central areas of Indonesia tend to regard the Krayan locals’ border crossing into Malaysia as a sign of decreasing loyalty, and hence a lack of nationalistic pride, towards the State of Indonesia. In contrast, the Krayan locals feel that their sense of nationalism and loyalty to the State of Indonesia is proven through their persistent wish to live in an area at the very edge of the country’s territory, regardless of the lack of development in Krayan. Living on the border with Malaysia, the locals see themselves as guardians of the sovereign territory of the Republic of Indonesia. Another factor is that in Krayan border crossing has long been part of life and existed prior to the formation of the two states. Crossing the border into Malaysia continues to be a matter of visiting family members, where ‘family’ includes all individuals who have a common cultural background and live on either side of the border. Also, as the respondents explained, the poor development in the region forces them to go to Malaysia and this does not compromise their loyalty to the State of Indonesia. The locals mentioned the expression Garuda di dadaku, tapi Malaysia di perutku (Garuda is on our chest, but our stomach is Malaysia), which aptly depict that they hold Indonesia in their hearts even though their livelihoods are supported by Malaysia’ (p. 260).

Even though the Covid-19 crisis slowly but surely does not restrict us in our travelling behaviour and our ‘border crossings’ her defence also showed that this kind of research is still very much needed for the rethinking of the way we deal with borders, as the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) did not grant her the Visum to defend her thesis live at the University in Nijmegen, 🙁
although especially academic research should by principle be borderless.

But we keep working on it…

 

Posted on

Civil Society Governance

The division between Government, Markets and Civil Society is increasingly blurring, like many other things in society seem to get blurred. At least from the perspective of Science, they are increasingly addressed as complex phenomena, which can not easily be reduced to one single principle, one single actor, or one single perspective. The world cannot easily be categorised or containerised anymore. More and more we become aware that the phenomena in our society are actually a contingent and contextual interplay of many different actors and forces. For Geographers the contextuality and place-specificness of these complex phenomena and developments are a fascinating object of research and of Place Making. This also changes the theoretical and conceptual frameworks we apply while investigating these phenomena and developments. Relational approaches like Practice Theories, Actor-Network Theories, Assemblage Theories and Complexity Theories are very much en vogue, addressing the relationships between the heterodox factors, conditions, intentions, and materialities, involved.

Today, Dr Benny D. Setianto, successfully defended his PhD Thesis on “Civil Society Governance”. This term in the first instance might sound paradoxical, because isn’t “Government” the opposite of “Civil Society”? Well, in the face of the above referred to developments in society as well as in the way we tend to conceptualise society, it comes not as a surprise. The traditional, rather containerised, concept of Government is described by Benny Setianto as “Government by Design” and contrasted to the role of Civil Society in this same field of government actions, as “Government by Accident”, or maybe one should say “bottom-up government”, “emergent governance”, or “government by coincidence” or even as the “government by the spontaneous coming together of different forces, actors, intentions and circumstances”. Benny Sentianto critically describes this interplay between Government and Civil Society in the shaping of Semarang Environmental Governance, and how this historically came about, and thus he also contributed to the reconceptualisation of the above-mentioned complexities in today’s society.

His PhD Thesis was supervised by Prof. Huib Ernste, Prof. Bas Arts and Dr Ton van Naerssen and is another result of the close cooperation between Unika Soegijapranata Catholic University in Semarang Indonesia and our Geography Department at the Radboud University, and there will be more to come…

Privacy Preference Center

Consent Management

Necessary

Advertising

Analytics

Other