Karlijn Haagsman (R.K.)
Profile
Karlijn Haagsman is Assistant Professor of Globalisation and Development at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. She is Programme Director of the MA Globalisation and Development Studies and co-director of the Maastricht Centre for Citizenship, Migration and Development (MACIMIDE).
Her research lies at the intersection of migration sociology, cultural anthropology and family studies. Her main area of expertise is transnational family life: families whose members live across national borders but continue to maintain relationships, exchange care and make decisions together.
Rather than focusing only on migrants, Karlijn studies the different people involved in transnational families, including children, parents, grandparents, caregivers and other significant relatives. She examines how migration, geographical distance and mobility shape care, well-being and relationships across generations. She is also interested in how these experiences are affected by gender, migration policies and unequal access to mobility.
Karlijn uses quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. Her research has included surveys and interviews. She is a member of the Globalisation, Transnationalism and Development research programme.
Current research
Karlijn’s current research focuses on care circulation and intra- and intergenerational relationships in transnational families. She is particularly interested in how care moves within and between generations and across borders, rather than being provided in only one direction.
Her current project examines visits by parents of adult migrants to their children and grandchildren in the Netherlands. It explores how visiting grandparents contribute to childcare and family life, how they themselves receive care and support, and how these arrangements affect intergenerational relationships and well-being.
The research also considers the tensions and inequalities that can shape these visits. These include gendered expectations about care, prolonged co-residence, differences in family and parenting norms, financial resources, housing conditions, and migration and visa regimes.
This project forms part of a broader research agenda on grandparents, extended kin and other significant actors whose roles have often received less attention in transnational family research.
Previous research projects
MO-TRAYL: Mobility Trajectories of Young Lives
From 2017 to 2022, Karlijn worked on the ERC-funded MO-TRAYL project, which examined how migration and different forms of mobility affect the well-being, education and life trajectories of young people in Ghana, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.
Her research focused particularly on the experiences of young people with migrant backgrounds and young people living in Ghana while one or both parents were abroad. It also examined how international travel and mobility shape young people’s relationships, identities, well-being and educational trajectories.
Visit the MO-TRAYL project website.
TCRAf-Eu: Transnational Child-Raising Arrangements
Karlijn conducted her PhD research within the TCRAf-Eu project on transnational child-raising arrangements between Africa and Europe.
Her dissertation, Parenting across borders, examined how living apart from underage children affected Angolan and Nigerian migrant parents in the Netherlands. Her research focused on parent–child relationships, well-being, health and employment, and on the ways parents continued to provide care and perform their parental roles across national borders.
Visit the TCRAf-Eu project website.
Academic roles and networks
Alongside her research and teaching, Karlijn is Programme Director of the MA Globalisation and Development Studiesand co-director of MACIMIDE.
She chairs the IMISCOE Standing Committee on Migrant Transnationalism and is a member of the management committee of the COST Action Transnational Family Dynamics in Europe. Within this COST Action, she co-chairs the working group on the health and well-being of transnational families.
Through these roles, she contributes to international research collaboration, doctoral training and exchanges between researchers, policymakers and civil-society organisations working on migration and transnational family life.
Expertises
Dr. Karlijn Haagsman is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project MO-TRAYL, which is focussed on Ghanaian youth mobility.
Karlijn has obtained a Bachelor and Master degree in Cultural Anthropology at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, and subsequently completed a 2-year Research Master termed ‘Migration, Ethnic Relations and Multiculturalism’ at the University of Utrecht. From 2010-2014 she was a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University (see more on her project below).
Her expertise lies in transnationalism, transnational families, migration studies, family studies and migrant youth. Her work is based in migration sociology and cultural anthropology.
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.
Career history
Karlijn Haagsman studied Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, where she obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. For her Master’s research, she conducted fieldwork on return migration and reintegration in Tonga.
She subsequently completed the Research Master’s programme in Migration, Ethnic Relations and Multiculturalism at Utrecht University. Her thesis examined the relationship between intergroup contact and attitudes among majority and minority groups in the Russian Federation.
From 2010 to 2014, Karlijn was a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. Her research was part of the TCRAf-Eu-project on transnational child-raising arrangements between Africa and Europe. Her dissertation, Parenting across borders: Effects of transnational parenting on the lives of Angolan and Nigerian migrant parents in the Netherlands, examined how separation from children affected migrant parents’ relationships, well-being, health and employment. She defended her dissertation in 2015.
From 2014 to 2016, Karlijn worked as a Lecturer in Globalisation and Development at Maastricht University. She taught and coordinated courses in the MA Globalisation and Development Studies and the minor Globalisation and Development and served as thesis coordinator for the master’s programme.
From 2017 to 2022, she combined her position as Assistant Professor with a postdoctoral research position in the ERC-funded MO-TRAYL project. In this project, she studied how migration and different forms of mobility shape the well-being and educational trajectories of young people in Ghana, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.
Since 2022, Karlijn has worked as Assistant Professor of Globalisation and Development. Since 2024, she has also served as Programme Director of the MA Globalisation and Development Studies. She is also co-director of the Maastricht Centre for Citizenship, Migration and Development (MACIMIDE) for the past few years.