Biography
Hilary 2026
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 lie in 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, with participatory approaches and fieldwork experience in Mozambique, Denmark, and England.
Andrea holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen (2018) and an MSc in Migration, Mobility and Development Studies from SOAS. She has an interdisciplinary background, having completed her BA and MA in Conference Interpretation and Translation Studies first at the Universidad Pontificia de Comillas in Madrid and 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.
Publications
Verdasco, A. (submitted) "Love is what you do": Motherlove as a transformative project of belonging in a context of displacement in the UK, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Morris, A. & Verdasco, A. (2020). Loneliness and Housing Tenure: older private renters and social housing tenants in Australia, Journal of Sociology 57 (4): 763-779
Verdasco, A. (2019). Everyday rituals of migration: Constructing relatedness and agency among young refugees in Denmark. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 85 (3): 550-574
Verdasco, A. (2018). Communities of Belonging in the Temporariness of the Danish Asylum System, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 45 (9): 1439-1457
Verdasco, A. (2017). Understandings of self through the category of the ‘unaccompanied asylum-seeking minor’: a Danish ethnography. Barn Special Issue (2-3): 43-57