Andrea Verdasco
Visiting Fellow
Dr Andrea Verdasco is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (UKRI funded) at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Social Research Institute. She is a social anthropologist with a theoretical interest in the anthropology of forced migration and refugee studies. Her research interests focus on issues around refugee families, motherhood, childhood, identity, relatedness and belonging. In her current project, 'Family reunion and refugee integration: the impact of the 'deserving refugee mother in the context of the UK', she investigates how refugee mothers navigate complex bureaucratic systems in the East of England. She has also conducted extensive research with unaccompanied young refugees exploring how they find a sense of belonging in contexts of liminality. Methodologically, her work is grounded in ethnographic methods through participatory approaches with fieldwork experience in Mozambique, Denmark and England.
Andrea holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Copenhagen (2018) and an M.Sc. in Migration, Mobility and Development Studies from SOAS. She has an interdisciplinary background having completed her B.A and M.A in Conference Interpretation and Translation Studies first at the Universidad Pontificia de Comillas in Madrid and later her postgraduate studies at the University of Geneva (2004) and the Monterey Institute of International Studies (2005). Before joining academia, Andrea worked extensively in the humanitarian and development sectors with NGOs and international organisations including IOM Tanzania, UNICEF Mozambique and the UNICEF Office of Research.