Elsemieke van Osch

Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy , Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
Department Social and Cultural Anthropology ,  Faculty of Social Sciences - KU Leuven

Research themes: Borders, migration governance and people on the move || Children, youth and families || Participation, integration and transnational relations || Refugee camps and asylum centres

Elsemieke van Osch is a PhD researcher affiliated with CESSMIR, Ghent University, and with the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, KU Leuven. She obtained an interdisciplinary Master of Arts in International Migration and Human Rights Law (Distinction) from the University of Kent. She was granted the MacGregor Award for her master thesis, for which she conducted ethnographic fieldwork with undocumented families in Brussels. Between 2016 and 2019, she worked in the field of asylum/migration. Drawing on these experiences, she is committed to building bridges between policy/practice, and academia.
Her PhD-research consists of a longitudinal ethnography of families’ experiences in the Belgian asylum regime. Taking as a starting point the process of applying for asylum, she follows families within and beyond the multiple stages of the asylum trajectory, capturing their experiences through participant observation, in-depth interviewing, home visits and storytelling.