I. Annual MACIMIDE Conference
On 21 September, the MACIMIDE conference took place. During several interesting workshops, panels and roundtable discussions, MACIMIDE researchers presented their work to researchers from the UM and to guest speakers and discussants from other universities.
The annual MACIMIDE conference took place at Kasteel Vaeshartelt. During several interesting workshops, panels and roundtable discussions, junior and senior MACIMIDE researchers presented their work to fellow researchers from the UM as well as to guest speakers and discussants from other universities. FASoS PhD’s and Post-Docs working on the topics of citizenship, migration, youth, families and development were heavily involved by organising workshops or presenting their work. Karlijn Haagsman and Swantje Falcke  represented FASoS in the organizing committee, together with Inge Hooijen representing SBE and Natasja Reslow representing the faculty of Law.

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II. (Cum Laude) Dissertation: “The Citizenship Premium”, by Floris Peters.
On March 28, 2018, Floris Peters defended his PhD dissertation entitled ‘The Citizenship Premium: Immigrant Naturalisation and Socio-Economic Integration in the Netherlands’, which received the cum laude designation for its excellent quality. In his research, supervised by prof. Maarten Vink and prof. Hans Schmeets, and jointly financed by the Maastricht Centre for Citizenship, Migration and Development (MACIMIDE) and Statistics Netherlands, Peters has studied the relevance of citizenship for the labour and housing market integration of first generation immigrants in the Netherlands. To analyse this relationship, the PhD project draws on individual-level administrative data from the System of Social Statistical Datasets (SSD) at Statistics Netherlands, which includes information on almost all registered first-generation immigrants in the Netherlands. Findings show that citizenship acquisition can be a stepping stone for the integration of immigrants, but the extent to which naturalisation matters strongly depends on immigrants’ individual life situation, as well as citizenship

policies that stipulate the pathways to citizenship that are open to immigrants.

The quality of the work by Floris has been recognized internationally as two chapters of the dissertation received distinctions by the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 2017. Moreover, his work was repeatedly cited in the Upper House of Dutch Parliament where a proposal was discussed in 2017 to increase the residence requirement for naturalisation from five to seven years; the work by Floris demonstrates that such a restrictive change would diminish the ‘economic returns’ of naturalisation and has contributed to the decision of the Senate to veto this proposal. In 2018, Floris, Maarten and Hans received the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASOS) Valorisation Prize in recognition of this societal impact.
Since January 2018, Floris is a post-doctoral researcher within Migrant Life Course and Legal Status Transition (MiLifeStatus). MiLifeStatus is a five-year ERC-funded research project (2016-2021), led by prof. Maarten Vink, in which the relationship between naturalisation and integration is studied cross-nationally using register and survey data from various European countries.

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III. PhD Project ‘Protecting across Borders. Sudanese families across the Netherlands, the UK and Sudan.’
Supervisors: Prof. dr Valentina Mazzucato and Prof. dr Virginie Baby-Collin. PhD Candidate: Ester Serra Mingot
This dissertation investigates how Sudanese migrants in the Netherlands and the UK, and their families ‘back home’ navigate their social protection, locally and across borders. This research is part of the ‘Transnational Migration, Citizenship and the Circulation of Rights and Responsibilities’ (TRANSMIC) project, funded by the European Union under the FP7-PEOPLE-2013-ITN call and is part of the Marie Curie Actions—Initial Training Networks funding scheme.
In our current globalised world, more and more people live across national borders, developing attachments and responsibilities in more than one nation-state. Yet, the traditional formal social protection systems have been envisaged to cater for sedentary populations, tied to one single country. Against this backdrop, this dissertation investigates the strategies that migrants develop to cover for their own and/or their families’ social protection needs, encompassing a series of formal and informal elements from different institutions (e.g. states, markets, third-sector organisations or informal social networks). It shows that the boundaries between formal and informal categories are blurred when we look at the combinations of institutional arrangements that migrants and their families use.
By taking the extended family as the main analytical unit, this dissertation shows that although certain formal resources are available for individual migrants, they might not be the preferred option for the family’s social protection. In fact, the flexible character of the informal intra-familial provisions might be preferred, since they allow for covering for several intertwined domains, binding family members together in a web of intergenerational reciprocity that expands over time and beyond nations. By including the Sudanese context, this dissertation highlights the importance of the sending country’s sociocultural rules on how intra-familial support—especially care—should be provided. Indeed, care is a crucial element in the social protection arrangements of transnational families, which depends on cultural notions of gender roles in the sending society.
This project is based on data collected over 14 months of multi-sited and partly matched-sample ethnography across the Netherlands, the UK and Sudan. The transnational approach and the multi-sited matched-sample design, allowed to incorporate data from the migrants and their non-migrant families, across sending and receiving countries. This allowed for a  comprehensive understanding  of  the ways  in  which contexts  shape  social protection arrangements, locally and transnationally.