Judith van Uden is a PhD candidate at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society and is part of the research project Living on the Other Side: A Multidisciplinary Analysis of Migration and Family Law in Morocco. In her research she explores how Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian migrants deal with the formal and informal aspects of major life events – marriage, divorce, birth and death - in Morocco. The aim is to develop a ‘legal-anthropology of South-South migration’ providing insight into the ways migrants shape their most intimate private lives and how this relates to Moroccan state laws. 

Judith started with a BSc in Cultural Anthropology and International Development Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen and continued specializing in the field of sociology of development by obtaining a MSc in International Development studies from Wageningen University. She wrote her master thesis about the strategic manners in which Syrian forced migrants employed their social network ties to gain access to public services and humanitarian aid in Turkey. Based on her ethnographic fieldwork she concluded that network ties were an important tool to obtain resources and that the messy nature of networks is an advantage in this particular context.

Activities