Daan Hovens (D.)

Daan Hovens is an assistant professor at Maastricht University (FASoS, Department of Literature and Art). He is interested in language diversity, border regions, and qualitative case studies that highlight a ‘marginalised’ and/or ‘bottom-up’ perspective on political themes such as European integration, labour migration, and workplace automation. Empirically, he often focuses on cases from the Dutch province of Limburg, but always with an international, European, and/or border-regional dimension.

Daan has a background in Scandinavian studies, journalism and European studies, which he studied at universities in Groningen, Uppsala, Göttingen and Osaka. He also worked for some time as a web editor and online journalist in the media world, including for the television programme Buitenhof.

From 2017 to 2020, Daan worked as a PhD candidate at Maastricht University (FASoS, expertise centre ITEM). His dissertation was an ethnography of a metal foundry in Limburg, where linguistic diversity among employees had changed significantly in a relatively short period of time. An innovative element was his posthumanist approach to human-machine interactions in the workplace.

From 2021 to 2023, Daan worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University (Faculty of Law, expertise centre ITEM). For the Interreg project EMRLingua, he conducted research on existing needs and bottlenecks regarding education in the so-called "neighbour languages" (Dutch, French, German) and the organisation of border-regional school activities in the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion.