Research
Dr Lieke van der Veer is a political and social anthropologist. Her research focuses on public policy and state-society relations. Alongside her PhD in Anthropology, she received multidisciplinary training in Philosophy of Science, Conflict Resolution and Governance, and Public Administration. As a postdoctoral researcher based at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Delft Technical University, she currently works in the project ‘Dilemmas of Doing Diversity.’ In this project she studies knowledge infrastructure, alliances with civil society organizations, and forms of administrative artistry that underpin diversity governance and anti-discrimination policies in Dutch bureaucracies. Her doctoral thesis (2023) is entitled: ‘Care in a Frictional Field of Forces: Assistance and Advocacy by and for Recent Refugees in Rotterdam.’ Based on long-term ethnographic field research, this thesis explores how refugee-led support initiatives are mediated by funding regimes, by advisors in refugee advocacy who perform as brokers, by citizenship ideals, and by bureaucratic practices of group-making. In 2020, she joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh as a visiting PhD-student. Research interests and areas of expertise are: economic and bureaucratic stimuli; the social construction of target groups; migration governance; humanitarian governance; welfare and integration regimes; ethnography of the state; self-organisation; cultures of neoliberalism; intersectionality; common concerns.
