Andrea Verdasco

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.

Research at ODID

During my stay at the Refugee Studies Centre, I will work on a book manuscript for my current fellowship that investigates how refugee families who arrived in England through family reunion navigate the welfare system and negotiate ‘deservingness’ to welfare services in their encounters with the UK state. By taking the refugee mothers as the ethnographic point of departure, I explore how interrelated understandings of motherhood, mothering and family are negotiated in 'welfare micropublics' with advocates and street-level bureaucrats. The bringing together of the motherhood and family reunification scholarships provides a unique insight into the experiences of refugee women and the kind of policies that might better support an inclusive integration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between September 2023 and March 2025, this study aims to generate new insights into how ‘the deserving mother’ can further the integration of reunited family members, especially their children. I focus on the gendered migrant subject in welfare interactions to examine how their subjectivities are affected and how they become subjects with agency.