Prof. dr. Willem Schinkel
Willem Schinkel is Professor of Social Theory at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He writes about politically urgent topics such as migration, race, global warming, democracy and smart technologies. He is highly active in the public sphere, and regularly participates in debates, gives lectures or appears on TV on these issues. He strongly believes that social science should be relevant, meaning it should speak to the urgent issues of our time, and contribute to the imagination of alternative futures.
Willem Schinkel is Professor of Social Theory at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is a former member and vice-chair of The Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of ten books, the latest of which is Imagined Societies. A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is a social theorist, and his work is at the crossroads of sociology, political theory and philosophy, science & technology studies (STS), anthropology and cultural theory. His cum laude dissertation won him the triennial prize from the Dutch society for criminology. His research has been funded by substantial grants from the European Research Council and the Dutch Research Council (NWO). His ResearchGate page provides access to most of his research papers. He has been visiting professor at New York University in 2007 and 2010, and at Humboldt University Berlin in 2011. At Erasmus University Rotterdam, he is one of the founders of Erasmus Institute for Public Knowledge, which seeks to connect academics working on publicly urgent topics with each other and with publics beyond the university. In 2011, he was recipient of the first ever Best Teacher Award at his department. He coordinates the Master’s Programme Engaging Public Issues, which is an expression of his belief that social science should be relevant, meaning it should speak to the urgent issues of our time, and contribute to the imagination of alternative futures.
Dr. Rogier van Reekum
Rogier van Reekum is an assistant professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is currently working on refugee settlement and issue formation. He has previously done research on border visuality, nationalism, place making, citizenship & migration politics, immigration policy and education.
Rogier van Reekum is an assistant professor in Sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Rogier is interested in questions of knowledge production and its role in a variety of political settings, from policy making and governance to public controversies and acts of resistance. In his own research, Rogier has mainly worked on these questions in the context of migration politics. He received a Ph.D. (cum laude) in Sociology at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (UvA) in 2014. His dissertation, titled Out of Character: Debating Dutchness, narrating citizenship, delves into public debates on national identity and Dutch nationalism. His postdoctoral work at the Erasmus University focused on the visuality and governmental monitoring of migration in Europe. Currently, Rogier is working on refugee settlement and issue formation in the Netherlands. Rogier regularly contributes to discussions on borders, migration, citizenship, knowledge production, difference and the politics of dignity.
Dr. Jess Bier
Jess Bier is an assistant professor of urban sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she studies the social and political geographies of science and technology. She is the author of Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge (MIT Press, 2017). PDFs of her recent publications are available at jessbier.org/publications.
Jess Bier is a writer and social theorist. She is an assistant professor of urban sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she studies the social and political geographies of science and technology. She is the author of the book Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge (MIT Press, 2017), and she received her Ph.D. in science and technology studies (STS) from Maastricht University (2014). Her work was awarded the university dissertation prize (2016) as well as a prize from the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association (2013). Previously she consulted on Geographic Information Science (GIS) cartography for community and relief organizations, such as the United Nations (UNRWA) Border Monitoring Unit in the West Bank. She writes about issues of social justice in areas like digital infrastructures, shipping and logistics, disaster recovery, the body, and the archive. Before coming to the Netherlands, she lived and worked in New York City. PDFs of her recent publications are available at jessbier.org/publications.