Samuel vander Straeten (2023)

Samuel vander Straeten is a social anthropologist and historian interested in urban life in postcolonial Europe, racialisation, young people, and everyday relationships of care. He is currently pursuing a PhD at this department, funded by the Allen, Meek & Read International Scholarship. Samuel initially studied history and historical theory at Ghent University, for which he received a BA in 2021 and an MA in 2022. Supported by the Fayat Scholarship from the Flemish Government, he then obtained an MPhil in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2023.

Throughout his bachelor’s and master’s studies, Samuel has combined anthropological approaches with historical and postcolonial theory to study. At Ghent University, he explored how academics, politicians, and activists relate to and engage with histories of (post)colonialism and exclusion. During his MPhil at Cambridge, he further mapped how these histories, and consciousnesses of these histories, manifest themselves in particular urban spaces and shape interracial relations, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the London district of Brixton. 

This led Samuel to his current PhD research project. This project explores how Moroccan-background young men navigate interrelated dynamics of historically ingrained racialised exclusion and everyday care in an Antwerp neighbourhood (Samuel’s hometown). Building on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with these young men, as well as with other neighbourhood actors and civil society partners, Samuel maps the various power-infused yet intimate relationships that his young interlocutors develop. In doing so, he has become particularly interested in the role of dynamics of watching and being watched – of “political economies of watching” – in the way these relationships are shaped, embodied, and enacted in and through urban space.