New researchers European Strains

There are two new researchers starting this Autumn who will be associated with the interdisciplinary project European Strains.

Migration, mobility and growth

Maria Brunborg Hoen. Photo: private

One of them is Maria Brunborg Hoen. She is a new Research Fellow at the Frisch Centre. She will be a part of the European Strains sub-project “Migration, Mobility and Growth”. Her project deals with labour migration in Europe. In the first part of her project she will analyze these labour migrant flows, and how these have changed after the Eastern enlargement of the EU in 2004 and the financial crises. The second part of her project is about labour migrants in Norway and entrepreneurship.  What groups of people are more likely to start their own companies?

Hoen finished the 5 year master´s degree program in economic theory and econometrics at University of Oslo in 2012. As a student she had two internships at the Research Unit at the Monetary Policy department at Norges Bank (the central bank of Norway). For the last two years she has worked at the Ministry of Finance.

Local responses to the economic crises

The other new researcher is Cathrine Moe Thorleifsson. She will start as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Department of Social Anthropology in October. She will be a part of the project Overheating: The three crises of globalisation as well as European Strains.

Her postdoctoral project “Old and New Nationalisms: local responses to the economic crisis in contemporary Europe” will examine the dynamics of various forms of nationalism in response to the economic crisis in Europe. Using United Kingdom, Hungary and Norway as case studies, she will, through secondary data, in-depth interviews and fieldwork, explore how different material conditions and social contexts can give rise to specific forms of xenophobia and intolerance such as anti-Muslim sentiments, antisemitism and antiziganism.

Cathrine Moe Thorleifsson. Photo: LSE

She earned a PhD in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2012. Major research interests include the anthropology of nationalism, borders and migration. She has worked for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Damascus, Syria, and she has conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork in northern Israel amongst Mizrahim (Jews from Arab and Muslim lands).

In her PhD research she used the dynamics at play along the Israeli/Lebanese border to develop wider conclusions about the nature of nationalism, identity, ethnicity and xenophobia, and the ways in which these shift over time and are manipulated in different ways for various ends. She explores the idea of being on the 'periphery' of nationhood: examining the identity-forming and negotiating processes of these Mizrahim who do not neatly dove-tail with the predominantly Ashkenazi concept of what it means to be 'Israeli'.

Published Aug. 14, 2014 2:09 PM - Last modified Aug. 15, 2014 10:07 AM