Mariska Jung

Biography

Mariska Jung is a PhD candidate with the Department of Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. She is the recipient of a fully-funded PhD scholarship from the VUB's strategic research program EDGE (Evaluating Democratic Governance in Europe), and a member of the research group and its organizing committee RHEA (Centre for Research on Gender Diversity and Intersectionality). Additionally, she is an invited member of an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers working towards the development of a European philosophy of race under the header of the Race-Religion Constellation Project based at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen in the Netherlands, led by Anya Topolski.

Jung's PhD research sits at the crossroads of political theory, gender studies, critical race theory and critical animal studies. Her work is profoundly interdisciplinary straddling both social sciences and the humanities. She conducts multiple case-studies on contemporary political phenomena (e.g. politicization of religious slaughter) in Europe to analyse the ways in which animals, race and religion relate to each other. As such her work builds on existing and ongoing research into the dynamics of gender and sexuality issues in relation to debates on migration, multiculturalism and racism in Europe, and adds a novel perspective on the figuration of animals and animality in these political debates and policy interventions. 

Jung graduated cum laude with two bachelor degrees in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences and Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She further obtained with distinction her master degree in Migration Mobility and Development Studies from SOAS University of London in the UK, where she specialized in queer migration and asylum policies and politics.

She is a supervisor of theses with the bachelor in Political Science and the master Gender and Diversity at the VUB and is an invited guest lecturer on queer theory, queer migration and queer asylum politics, and feminist perspectives to nature and animals.

Prior to joining the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Mariska Jung worked as a researcher with several civil society organizations, such as the European Network Against Racism in Belgium and RADAR in the Netherlands. She also worked as a producer, program organizer, panelist and moderator in public debating centers in Amsterdam, such as Studio K, Pakhuis De Zwijger and De Balie. She is a Senior Fellow with the international Humanity in Action Fellowship and a member of Dekolonisatie Netwerk voormalig Nederlands-Indië, a network for people in the Netherlands with a diasporic connection to the colonial Dutch East-Indies and contemporary Indonesia, the Moluccan Islands and Papua.

Research Expertise: critical race theory, queer theory, queer migration, feminism, postcolonial and decolonial theory, animality, critical animal studies, intersectionality

Research Methodology: Directed content analysis, critical discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis