Housing, home-making and urban mobilities

Description: The Hub Developing in Diversity wants to apply social innovation to increase opportunities for all children, youth and adults in Ghent. We mainly address social inequality in a learning context, by fully utilizing diversity. The Hub designs solutions which support them in their development and help them to build a future. The Hub is a space where innovative ideas are tested in short-term experiments, which can influence opinion, vision and policy regarding diversity. The experiments build on cocreation and exchange of knowledge and expertise, between Higher Education institutes of Ghent, the City of Ghent, citizens, institutions and organisations. The Hub will be fully operating by the end of 2021. In the meantime we set up a couple of pilots and prepare the working of the hub.
Website research project: https://www.ontwikkelenindiversiteit.be/
Promoter(s): Wendelien Vantieghem , Piet Van Avermaet
Researcher(s): Iris Vandevelde , Sofie Beunen , Eva Dierickx
Faculty / Faculties: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
Period of time: 2019 - 2035

Description: The structural exclusion of illegalised migrants from Belgian society, their limited rights and restricted access to social services render it difficult for social workers and volunteers to provide more than just material support, situated in the present. This research project aims to gain a deeper understanding of structural social support practices and specific approaches to socio-legal and psycho-social support through ethnographic research methods. Therefore, the project focuses on local and municipal initiatives that link conditional welfare services, namely shelter, to intensive social counselling towards certain future perspectives for illegalised migrants. At the same time, the research endeavours to encompass how social workers, volunteers and illegalised migrants themselves construct informal forms of social support.
Promoter(s): Robin Vandevoordt , Ine Lietaert , Ellen Desmet
Researcher(s): Soline Ballet
Faculty / Faculties: Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences , Faculty of Law and Criminology
Period of time: 2021 - 2025