Mirjam Twigt is a Research Officer / Postdoctoral Researcher for the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre Governance of Migration and Diversity (LDE GMD). Her work is geared toward supporting interdisciplinary research on the interrelationship between migration AND diversity and the politics and power involved. She is primarily based at the Institute of History at the University of Leiden.
Mirjam obtained her Ph.D. at the School of Media, Communication, and Sociology from the University of Leicester, UK (2018). It considered the social and subjective roles that digital technologies play in the lives of urban refugees in Jordan. She then moved to Jordan as she was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the Council of British Research in the Levant (CBRL) to conduct follow-up research on humanitarian communication. She subsequently worked as a Research Officer for Jordan's main refugee legal aid provider. Her most recent postdoctoral research project at the University of Oslo was focused on refugee legal aid provision in the Kurdish Region of Iraq (KRI). It was part of the REF ARAB project, a research project led by Professor Maja Janmyr and funded by the Research Council of Norway geared to study refugee protection in non-signatory states in West Asia.
Her monograph Mediated Lives: Waiting and Hope among Urban Iraqi Refugees was published in 2022 by Berghahn Books as part of their Forced Migration series. Other research outcomes were published in high-quality academic journals or are under review. She has also published in reports and other publications that are accessible to wider audiences. This includes the work she did together with her REF-ARAB colleagues and research partner: together with Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre they produced a special feature on the Mobilization of Refugee Rights in the MENA in the Forced Migration Review (FMR) - the most-read publications among humanitarian practitioners - which is due to come out in June 2023.
