On 3 October, two junior researchers - Tulya Su Guven and Edith Walravens - were awarded FWO PhD Fellowships, allowing them to further develop and carry out their doctoral research.
Tulya will be working on her PhD project titled "Navigating Life in Migration: Socio-Spatial Integration of Newcomers", under the supervision of Veerle Buffel (promotor) and Eva Van Belle (co-promotor). As migration continues to shape European societies, understanding migrant integration remains a pressing challenge. While existing research has largely focused on structural dimensions such as labour market participation, education, and housing, Tulya’s research highlights the underexplored socio-spatial aspects of integration. It examines how newcomers navigate public and informal spaces in their daily lives, and how these experiences shape their social networks, sense of belonging, and mental wellbeing. Adopting a mixed-methods approach—combining respondent-driven surveys with interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic observations—the study applies an intersectional lens to explore how socio-demographic factors influence access to and use of so-called third places, or social spaces beyond home and work. By comparing socio-spatial indicators with classical integration metrics, the project aims to offer a multidimensional understanding of integration processes and contribute to broader European debates on social cohesion and wellbeing.
Edith’s PhD project, titled "A Seat for Every Class? The Representation of Class-Based Work Logic in European Democracies", will be supervised by Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe (promotor) and Karen Celis (co-promotor). Her research addresses the persistent underrepresentation of the working class in national parliaments by moving beyond traditional class categories and focusing instead on distinct work logics—technical, organisational, and interpersonal—as conceptualised in Oesch’s occupation-based framework. The project combines insights from sociology and political science, and expands its geographical focus to include Southern and Eastern European democracies. Using machine learning to analyse parliamentary interventions, Edith will investigate whether the descriptive underrepresentation of certain work-logic classes also results in their substantive underrepresentation in policy discourse. Her analysis draws on a variety of data sources, including the European Social Survey (2002–2023), the Pathways to Power Project (1991–2010), and newly collected web-scraped parliamentary data (2002–2023).
