Karlijn Haagsman (R.K.)

MO-TRAYL Project

From January 2017 to January 2022 Karlijn is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project MO-TRAYL, under the supervison of 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. How the life chances of youths, defined as their educational performance, psychological well-being and transitions into adulthood, are impacted by migration is of relevance for European cities that are faced with a growing youth population with migrant background. At the same time, cities in the Global South, where many migrants in Europe originate from, are faced with large portions of the population of minors who are living without at least one of their parents due to their parents’ migration. There is growing concern in both academia and policy about how these ‘stay-behind’ children are faring. Yet little is known about how migration impacts young people in the Global North and South in the medium-term, in part because our conception of young people’s mobility patterns has to date been overly simplified (either they move once, or they do not) and a national perspective has guided research. This results in a lack of data that specifically looks at the different mobility patterns of young people and hardly any that has a longitudinal dimension.

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 projecct, for which she will collect survey data through schools in each of the locations. 

PhD project - TCRAf-Eu

From January 2010 until July 2014 Karlijn Haagsman was involved as a PhD researcher at the department of Technology and Society Studies of FASoS 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 succesfully April 10, 2015.

This dissertation is about migrant parents in transnational families, i.e. families whose members live in two or more nation-states and whose kinship ties, as a result, extend across national borders. Although multi-local families have existed for centuries, increased global connections and strict family migration policies have changed the nature and scope of these families. On the one hand, communication technologies and cheaper travel have facilitated better contact across great distances. On the other hand, the greater distances travelled and strict migration policies have created obstacles for reunification and have resulted in protracted separations. The relatively new but burgeoning field of transnational family studies has shown that migrant parents part of transnational families face many challenges and that parent-child separation can have negative consequences for the well-being of migrant parents. This dissertation contributes to this literature by investigating the effects of transnational parenting on the lives of Angolan and Nigerian migrant parents in The Netherlands.

By building on this mainly ethnographic body of literature, this dissertation tries to advance our understanding of the effects of transnational separation by utilizing survey data that allowed the analysis of various factors identified by previous studies simultaneously. By using survey data and including a group of non-transnational parents, I study the association between transnational parent-child separation and parental well-being, control for confounding factors, investigate specific moderation and mediation effects, and reveal which conditions are of special importance for the well-being of transnational parents. Finally, this study focuses on different aspects of transnational parents’ well-being, not all of which have been explored before. Three aspects of parental well-being are investigated that are intrinsically related to each other, namely, the quality of the transnational parent-child relationship, parents’ subjective well-being and health, and job outcomes.