Academic profile 

In my academic work I am driven by curiosity and societal engagement. Urgent, complex issues are at the heart of my scholarship. In my work I disentangle issues of spatial inequalities, social class and politics, integrating policy analysis, interviews and statistical analysis. Trained as an urban geographer and political scientist, I collaborate nationally and internationally with scholars, across disciplinary boundaries of political science,  sociology, complexity sciences and policy studies. My projects focus on the intersections of social class, gender, politics, and space, through the lens of consumption, education and housing. Currently I am working on my ERC-consolidator project PROTEINSCAPES: the political geography of meat and dairy.

I am member of the board of the Royal Geographical Society (KNAG) and the board of UvA’s Centre for Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS) and the UvA center for Inequality Studies (AMCIS).

ERC-consolidator research

The new project PROTEINSCAPES, the political geographies of meat and dairy, compares how meat becomes political at deifferent spatial scales in four European countries. 

While production of meat and dairy plays a key role in climate change and biodiversity loss, consumption of animal-based proteins is at historically high levels. This protein paradox is explained in this study through a geographical approach that investigates two main hypotheses: increasing politicization of consumption linked to a growing political-spatial polarization of sustainability issues; and the political inertia, resulting from lack of a sense of urgency; fragmentation of interests and governance across sectors and governmental levels and the difficulty of navigating the increasingly polarized policy making context.

Completed research projects

* Compass project: Agent based model of school segregation:

The COMPASS project aims to uncover the dynamics of school choice and resulting patterns of school segregation by assuming a multi-dimensional approach to segregation. The research consists of two parts: The first will particularly look into patterns and trends of segregation that lie at the different intersections of class and ethnicity, with a special focus on differences within highly educated groups and of intersections of migrational background, income and educational attainment. This will lead to new multi-dimensional measures (macro) of segregation which can be used to assess current segregation and also assess the validity of the model (see below).

The second part of the research will develop an agent-based model of school choice and school allocation that will enable us to study how potential disruptions (policy interventions, demographic scenarios) affect choice and resulting patterns of school segregation. This model will focus on how parental choice and school allocation mechanisms (centralised vs. non-centralised) impact the level of segregation in different neighbourhoods. With a validated model the inspectorate will be able to test potential policies and assess their relative impact on segregation.

*VENI project: Placing educational inequalities

Education is the most crucial factor in facilitating social mobility but may also play a major role in the reproduction of social inequalities. This project integrates sociological and geographical perspectives on educational inequalities by studying how parents of disparate ethnic and social class backgrounds develop different socio-spatial strategies to secure access to ‘good’ schools.

The main question of this research project is: How can educational inequalities be explained through the socio-spatial strategies of school choice of different groups of parents?

* MAPS: Mixed Classes Pedagogical Solutions

The MAPS project analyses inclusion in education from a holistic and intersectional perspective. This means we seek to bring together and analyse divisions based on ethnicity, social class, gender and educational needs across urban environments. We investigate the interplay of policies and practices, macro, meso and micro levels of educational inclusion in the everyday life of three (pre-)primary schools in the urban areas of Finland, Iceland and the Netherlands.

MAPS serves not just as a guide through complex terrains, but also as a device that can help bridge across different streams of policy-relevant research which are often isolated from each other: we will bring together sociological discussions about just education policy on the one hand, and pedagogically and psychologically driven studies on teachers’ classroom practices in urban areas on the other. MAPS promises to have an impact not only on sociology of education and educational policy studies, but also on other fields of comparative education, teacher education, educational governance and urban planning.

https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/mixed-classes-and-pedagogical-solutions

* Residential preferences of higher educated workers (2012-2014)

* Young people on the Amsterdam housing market (2013)

PhD Dissertation

Urban middle-class families.
The study investigates how practices of young middle-class urbanites change when they become parents. It establishes a link between the neighbourhood as place of residence andtheway in which lives are socially and spatially organised. The project combines time-space budget approaches with Bourdieu's theories on practice and taste. It will research the scale of urban middle-class family life, the meaning of place in family life, and the way in which class position structures different residential practices within the middle classes.