Mark van Ostaijen is Assistant Professor and works as Managing Director of the LDE Centre Governance of Migration and Diversity. In that position he is responsible for the daily management and coordination of the research centre, its activities and its research and communication strategy.
In his previous research project at Tilburg University, SmartUrbI granted by NWO Urban Europe, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork on how 'smart urban intermediaries' make a difference in neighborhoods of Amsterdam, Glasgow, Birmingham and Copenhagen. Before he started at Tilburg University, Mark worked as lecturer and PhD candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) and at the Netherlands School of Public Administration (NSOB).
All societies produce strangers; but each kind of society produces its own kind of strangers, and produces them in its own inimitable way (Bauman, 1995: 1)
In 2013, together with prof. dr. Godfried Engbersen and prof. dr. Peter Scholten, he received a NWO Urban Europe Research Grant on the research project ‘IMAGINATION’ which resulted in his PhD dissertation 'Worlds between words'. This dissertation was awarded as ‘Best PhD thesis’ by the Erasmus Graduate School (2017). During his PhD research he was one of the founders and chairman of the IMISCOE PhD network, an Organizing Committee Member of the Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) conference in Leicester (UK) and a visiting doctoral research fellow at De Montfort University (UK).
Recently, he published a Dutch book ‘Wij zijn ons. Een kleine sociologie van grote denkers’ (Vantilt / Boom 3th edition), is a Committee Member of the Colloquium Critical and Interpretive Public Administration at the Netherlands Institute of Government (NIG), Editorial Board Member of the academic journal Beleid & Maatschappij and columnist for the journal Sociologie Magazine.
