Karlijn Haagsman

Dr. Karlijn Haagsman is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project MO-TRAYL, which is focused on Ghanaian youth mobility. Her expertise lies in transnationalism, transnational families, migration studies, family studies and migrant youth. Her work is based in migration sociology and cultural anthropology.

Karlijn has obtained a Bachelor and Master degree in Cultural Anthropology at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, and subsequently completed a 2-year Research Master termed ‘Migration, Ethnic Relations and Multiculturalism’ at the University of Utrecht. From 2010-2014 she was a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University (see more on her project below).

From January 2010 until July 2014 Karlijn Haagsman was involved as a PhD researcher at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University in the project ‘Effects of transnational child-raising arrangements on life-chances of children, migrant parents and caregivers between Africa and Europe (TCRAf-Eu)’. Her thesis, as part of this project is titled Parenting across borders: Effects of transnational parenting on the lives of Angolan and Nigerian migrant parents in The Netherlands. She submitted this dissertation in July 2014 and defended her dissertation successfully April 10, 2015.

Currently, Karlijn is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project MO-TRAYL, under the supervison of Prof. dr. Valentina Mazzucato. This project focusses on mobility trajectories and life-chances of Ghanaian youth in The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Ghana. The objective of the project is to develop a better understanding of the relationship between migration and young people’s life-chances by studying youth’s mobility trajectories. MO-TRAYL will break new ground by studying simultaneously youths in the Global South who have remained ‘at home’ and those who have migrated to Europe by making use of unique new longitudinal data collected in the Global South as well as collecting new data in the Global North that specifically traces the mobility trajectories, the resulting different family compositions along the way, and how both affect life chances. Through a transnational perspective in which family members and events spanning home and host countries are brought to bear on life chances, MO-TRAYL aims to re-conceptualize youth mobility and families and add a longitudinal dimension to the study of migration and life chance outcomes. The project focuses on Ghanaian children in Ghana, The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

Karlijn is involved in the quantitative part of the project, for which she will collect survey data through schools in each of the locations. 

Key publications:

Haagsman, R.K. (2015). Parenting across borders: effects of transnational parenting on the lives of Angolan and Nigerian migrant parents in The Netherlands. Maastricht University. Maastricht: Datawyse | Universitaire Pers Maastricht.

Haagsman, K., Mazzucato, V. & Dito, B.B. (2015). Transnational families and the subjective well-being of migrant parents: Angolan and Nigerian parents in the Netherlands. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28 (15), 2652-2671.

Haagsman, K. & Mazzucato, V. (2014). The Quality of Parent–Child Relationships in Transnational Families: Angolan and Nigerian Migrant Parents in The Netherlands. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40 (11), 1677-1696.

Keywords:
Cultural Anthropology / Sociology
Migration Studies
Transnationalism
Transnational families
Sub-Sahara Africa (Nigeria & Angola)
Pacific (Tonga)