The master's specialisation in Sociology of Policy in Practice provides academic and professional skills to independently design and execute research projects within and outside organisations.

Kuba funerary art from the Congo River Basin

In order to deepen your knowledge of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, we encourage you to continue your studies with a master's programme.

Museums are powerful and influential institutions in their ability to shape knowledge and contribute to our identity. What we preserve and how we present our collections and heritage is closely connected to our identity and culture. In the multidisciplinary Museums, Heritage and Collections, you'll…

How do descendants of survivors of violent conflict anticipate and respond to potential, future disaster – both potential new conflict and natural hazards?

We know that armed conflict breeds conflict. We also know the political, economic and demographic factors that inform this repetition of conflict. But we do not understand why accumulated conflict risk factors sometimes do and other times do not pay out in more violence. What if we go beyond macro structural…

JUSTREMIT is an ERC-funded project that brings together political theory, ethnography, and security studies in an interdisciplinary study of remittances and global justice.

Growing health inequalities, rising healthcare costs, an ageing population, and shortages of healthcare staff are just some of the challenges facing healthcare, both in the Netherlands and beyond. These issues transcend the boundaries of the medical sector and touch on broader themes such as social…

The research that is united in the Liveable Planet programme, touches upon a wide range of aspects of human life. The goal is to deepen and expand the scope and to connect more researchers. The following case studies are examples of current research projects.

Andrea Giolai defended his thesis on 3 May 2017.

This study focuses on the local level impacts of a highly globalised industry: the international trade in tropical timber.

The research aims to understand how did Cuban and Dominican landscape encapsulate historical conceptual transformations about human –nature spiritual interaction after the Spanish conquest? More specifically, what are the present day cultural associations with Cuban and Dominican natural landscape?…

This socio-legal study focuses on the implementation of climate change response laws and policies in developing countries with a weak rule-of-law environment, and their (unforeseen) effects on vulnerable peoples’ land rights.

How sustainable are open data infrastructures? Will the data we need in the future be available and usable? This project takes COVID-19 data/infrastructures as a case to study the sustainability and dynamics of open data infrastructures.

In what ways can visual art play a vital role in countering the discriminating stigma experienced by transgender communities?

A recent archaeology of Trio movements

On the 14th of June, Yliana Rodriquez successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Yliana on this achievement!

Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University is renowned for its international orientation and broad range of theoretical, methodological, and regional expertise.

There is little evidence of the routes connecting Amerindian communities in the Caribbean prior to and just after 1492. Uncovering possible canoe routes between these communities can help to explain the structure, capabilities, and limitations of the physical links in their social and material networks.…

This ethnographic research is a joint project with the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, and KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. It aims to understand the experiences of social inclusion and exclusion of female migrants…

How do technologies of computer vision, which promise to replace humans in the understanding of images, work in practice in the field of security, and what are their ethical and political implications?

Since the emergence of humankind people have maintained social contacts and traveled widely, establishing interaction networks in which goods are traded and ideas are transmitted, increasingly on a global scale.

On the 1st of December Marcela A. Garcia Probert successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

To what extent are there differences between countries in and outside the European Union and the Schengen area in the level of crimmigration, the merger between migration control and crime control, and to what extent can these differences be explained by the way in which state and non-state actors in…

This project will study the influence of Arabic, Iberian, and Italian representations of Africa, as well as the impact of local African knowledge, on Dutch imaginations which were public in nature, and thus affected a shared European understanding of African alterity.

The history of sign languages of deaf people is severely understudied. The historical linguistics of sign languages offers a fundamentally new perspective on the history of human languages. This project addresses the dearth of knowledge about historical sign language linguistics through a large-scale…

The Master’s specialisation in Sociology of Policy in Practice teaches you to think along with organisations to help them respond to the challenges they are facing in our global and quickly changing societies.

PhD defence

Past, Present and Future of Nubian Communities in Sudan

Evidence and Care-work in a home visiting program to promote maternal sensitivity and parental reflective functioning in Alexandra township, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Leiden University offers several services to help you prepare for the jobmarket. But where you end up depends on the chosen study direction, your own skills and interests.

Cities in Europe house an increasingly diverse population with roots in many different parts of the world. They have also seen the growth of anti-immigrant sentiments and new forms of nationalism. Who belongs to Europe and what such belonging entails is heavily debated. What comes out of this paradoxical…

How did local lifeways and crafting practices persist and develop in the diverse environments of the increasingly interconnected Gulf of Fonseca (AD 400-1521)?

Learn to use a visual ethnography framework in each phase of the research process.

Cristina Grasseni’s project

FluidKnowledge will investigate the past, present and future of evaluating ocean science. Regarding the past, it will ask how research priorities in ocean science evolved until now. Which lines of inquiry became hot topics, and which died out? Who became global players, who ended up in the periphery?…

Ethnography and Photography in a Moroccan Berber Village

Research how ‘custom’, ‘traditions’ and ‘heritages’ take on new meanings in the uplands of South and (mainland) Southeast Asia.

- Case study of the Hungarian Archaeological Mission in Abdallah Nirqi in 1964 –

This project investigates ancient water management of streams, springs and runoffs on the archaeological site of Monte Albán, Mexico, as a means to contribute with different stakeholders in the development of sustainable solutions to water problems today such as floods and scarcity.

The research involves the application and combination of archaeological and archaeometrical methodologies. Petrographic analysis and isotopic provenance studies of raw materials and exotics, and the study of the distribution patterns of these materials are used to gain insight into the exchange of goods…

In this publication, May Tamimova and Tahir Abbas researched the existing literature about violence and hatred against places of worship.

Correctly interpreting the patterns of fire evidence in the archaeological record will illuminate the origin of human fire use.

What is the role of local authorities and communities in shaping how inter-Schengen borders are understood and dealt with?

CADS researchers give methodology their own unique signature through two parallel engagements: (a) teaching and researching the full range of social science methods, from audio-visual engagements, through global ethnography, to statistical analysis; and (b) interrogating these multiple modalities employing…

A multi-disciplinary approach to past lifestyles and cultural practices

This section features online articles by or about the team members of the Food Citizens? project.

In this project we ask: how does pollution manifest as part of different practices, both socially and materially.

A global synthesis of the extent, diversity and patterns in off-site fire use by historically documented and current hunter-gatherers with the remit of this study in the deeper past.