Prof. dr. mr. Maartje van der Woude (Van Vollenhoven Institute) has received funding from the National Police to carry out a phenomenon research on the extent to which, and how, human trafficking and human smuggling are intertwined phenomena in intra-Schengen border areas.

The project officially started in September 2020, but with the enrolment of PhD students Hanum Atikasari and Shajeela Shawkat the research team of the ERC project 'Globalizing Palliative Care? A Multi-sited Ethnographic Study of Practices, Policies and Discourses of Care at the End of Life' is compl…

NWO has granted a 4-year subsidy to the project The Popular Culture of Illegality, ellaborated in collaboration between the University of Amsterdam, University Utrecht and Leiden University. This research focuses on the esthetic representations and practices in visual, musical and symbolical forms of…

Lou Boshart won the Excellence in Visual & Multimodal Ethnography Thesis Prize for his film ‘Layers of Confidence’. Lou produced a multimodal thesis about the way rat catchers in New Zealand enact conservation policies and reflect on the ethical challenges of eradicating invasive species. Xiaohui Liu…

How do local, non-institutional ideas about end-of-life care influence professional palliative care and vice versa? These questions will be answered by medical anthropologists Annemarie Samuels and Natashe Lemos Dekker in the coming years.

This conference explored the various ways in which anthropologists at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology engage with global vulnerabilities and social resilience through their ethnographic research and representation. All staff and students were invited to participate…

Cristina Grasseni and Adele Arrigoni Ravasio have co-presented the result of Grasseni’s ethnography with Val Taleggio’s cheesemakers.

Investigating the intercultural connections that shaped practices of knowledge production in colonial Dutch Brazil.

‘The care of an au pair' is chosen as the best Fieldwork NL report and 'The unruly reality of a new government' as the best master's thesis. Lila van Grieken, Annika Kruger, Benjamín Maldonado Fernández and Holly Zijderveld and Mony Klaus receive the Speckmann Award 2024.

With an ERC grant, anthropologist Jasmijn Rana will explore how outdoor groups address the lack of diversity and how ethno-racial inequalities are experienced and resisted in Europe's outdoor spaces.

Marianne Maeckelbergh has received a Consolidator grant from the European Research Council for a project on the impact of property regimes on experiences of citizenship. The project will be carried out in five democratic countries: Greece, The Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United St…

Annemarie Samuels and Andrew Littlejohn, Assistant Professors at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, have both been awarded a Leiden University Fund research grant. Samuels will use the grant to kickstart a multi-sited ethnographic study of care at the end of life.…

Nine staff members of the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance, and Society participated in the Law and Society Association’s (LSA) annual conference from 27-30 May. VVI staff presented ten conference papers, organised multiple sessions, as well as served as chairs and discussants for numerous…

Call for participation:

Medical Anthropologist Lemos Dekker has been interviewed about dementia and euthanasia for Relevant, the magazine of the Dutch Association for a Voluntary End of Life.

All over Europe you will find ethnographic museums with large collections of indigenous objects from Latin America. These collections shaped the image of native populations in the European mind. An ERC Starting Grant allows Dr Martin Berger to look at the bigger picture, contextualizing individual collections…

Bart Barendregt receives a Vici grant of 1.5 million euros from the NWO for his research project 'One between the Zeros, an Anthropology of Artificial Intelligence in Islam'.

With its iconic buildings, Leiden University has a strong presence throughout the city. The university has left its mark clearly on museum collections in the city.

This collaborative project aims to explore the history of the concept “barbarism” in Europe from the 18th century to the present, with a particular emphasis on the role of literature and art in the concept’s shifting functions.

The project will investigate the use of Artificial Intelligence in the labour market, and how biases in hiring and promoting processes based on personal characteristics are potentially reproduced with AI-based systems.

A study concerning the collective memory in the region of the Bene lo Ya/ Ene lo I'ya, Sierra Norte, Oaxaca.

The research programme Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics brings together LUCL researchers who focus mainly on descriptive and comparative linguistics.

On this page you will find more information about the selected projects of the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Fund for 2024.

Time, Religion and Sacred Discourses of the Ayuuk People

To what extent are there differences between countries in and outside the European Union and the Schengen area in the level of crimmigration, the merger between migration control and crime control, and to what extent can these differences be explained by the way in which state and non-state actors in…

Within the Graduate School you can conduct your PhD research in a wide range of subjects across the Social and Behavioural Sciences, with five distinct research areas offered by its Institutes.

Students of Leiden University's Master's in Visual Ethnography join a decades-long legacy, producing inspiring films and projects supported by the Metje Postma Fund.

In both the autumn and the spring semesters, full bachelor programmes worth 30 ECTS are offered. Besides these study programmes, NIMAR provides an honours track for bachelor students from various disciplinary backgrounds and contributes to study trips in Morocco.

The international bachelor's programme in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology covers three years, allowing you to establish a firm foundation and specialise in topics that you find interesting.

To foster interfaculty collaborations and explore common ground for working interdisciplinary on health-related themes in Leiden and beyond, the Leiden University Medical Anthropology Network has been set up.

The Scientific Commission of the Swiss Anthropological Association (SSE-SEG-SAA) convenes once a year a major conference around thematic panels. This year, the annual meeting of the SSE-SEG-SAA addressed the topic of “norms and alternatives”. Prof. dr. Cristina Grasseni and lecturer Janine Prins participated…

Dr. Katharine MacDonald (Faculty of Archaeology) sketches the background to a recent paper in Science Advances, co-authored by her and other members of the Liveable Planet team.

In the upcoming months, PhD candidates Neske Baerwaldt (FdR / VVI) and Wiebe Ruijtenberg (FSW / CAOS) will produce the ethnographic podcast series ‘Grensverhalen’. The series will be published online in September, and will be used as teaching material in various courses.

What are the patterns and processes of human mobility in the pre-colonial circum-Caribbean as revealed by burial populations and what are the underlying motives and socio-cultural principles on both micro- and macro-scales?

On Friday 4th February 2022 we welcomed in hybrid format (in person and online live streaming) 154 registered participants, of which 97 online, to present the first results of the Food Citizens? ERC Consolidator project.

On Thursday May 11, medical anthropologists from Leiden University organized a festive opening of their new network, the Leiden University Medical Anthropology Network (LUMAN). In August 2022, these Leiden-based scholars started gathering and organizing this new network with two main goals, namely to…

Students interested in the study of Morocco can enroll in English-taught minor ‘Culture and Society in Morocco’, starting in September at the NIMAR institute in Rabat. The minor is accessible for all students of universities in The Netherlands.

John Boy will be an Urban Citizen Fellow for the next academic year with his research project Urban Citizenship and Emerging Critical Technical Practices in Amsterdam. He will research the question: What critical technical practices are technologists in Amsterdam experimenting with, and how they can…

The Dutch Royal Couple received 70 scientists at the yearly gala for the Diplomatic Corps at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam on 14 June 2023.

Natashe Lemos Dekker has been awarded the Distinguished Women Scientists Fund 2021. This travel grant for female postdocs allows her to spend a period as a visiting fellow at the UCLA Department of Anthropology in the United States.

The Food Citizens? team is preparing to welcome ten international PhD and Masters students in January in Leiden.

In the opinion article ‘Maak praten over de dood niet tot een morele plicht’ (Don’t turn talking about death into a moral obligation) Annemarie Samuels and Liesbeth van Vliet, argue together with Marike de Meij and Sander de Hosson that it is important to have conversations about death and dying but…

This video accompanies the article "Navigating Discretion: A Diplomatic Practice in Moments of Socio-political Rupture", published in Vol. 14, Issue 4 of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy.

Meet our team

A vibrant chronological narrative of ceramic manufacturing practices in the valley of Juigalpa, Chontales, Nicaragua (cal 300 CE - present)

This February Metje Postma will stop teaching and retire. But she is not done with the discipline yet: she will finish her PhD and there are still five films on the shelf that she plans to complete.

Global Interactions is pleased to announce that we have awarded a GI Advanced Seminar grant to Dr. Mariana Francozo (Archaeology) for 'Historia Naturalis Brasiliae' and a Breed Grant for 'Global Earth Matters' to Dr. Sabine Luning (CA-DS) and Dr. Wayne Modest (RCMC)