Mariska Jung

Mariska Jung is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. She is the recipient of a fully funded PhD scholarship from the VUB's strategic research program EDGE (Evaluating Democratic Governance in Europe), and a core member of RHEA, the university’s centre for research on gender, diversity and intersectionality. Additionally she a member of the Race-Religion Constellation research hub at Radboud Universiteit (the Netherlands). In 2022, she was a Fulbright Schuman Fellow at University of California, Berkeley (USA) in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

Jung's research sits at the crossroads of critical race theory, Black Studies, postcolonial theory, animal studies, environmental humanities, gender studies, political ecology, and political sociology. Her work is thus profoundly interdisciplinary straddling both social sciences and humanities. She conducts multiple case-studies on contemporary political phenomena (e.g. Parliamentarian debates on religious slaughter) to disentangle the dynamics between race, religion and animal politics in Europe. As such her work builds on existing and ongoing research into the dynamics of gender and sexuality issues in relation to debates on migration, multiculturalism and racism in Europe, and adds a novel perspective on the figuration of animals in these political debates and policy interventions.

Jung graduated cum laude with two bachelor degrees in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences and Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). She also obtained with distinction her master degree in Migration Mobility and Development Studies from SOAS University of London (UK), where she specialized in queer immigration and European asylum politics.

Jung is a supervisor of theses in Political Science (bachelor) and Gender and Diversity (master). She is a teaching assistant with the MA module Overview of Feminist Thought and has given guest lectures on queer immigation and politics, as well as on feminist perspectives on nature and animals.

Prior to joining the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Jung worked as a researcher with several civil society organizations, e.g. the European Network Against Racism (Belgium0 and anti-discrimination and equity organization RADAR (the Netherlands). She is is a Senior Fellow with the international Humanity in Action Fellowship and a member of Dekolonisatie Netwerk voormalig Nederlands-Indië, a network for people in the Netherlands with a diasporic connection to the colonial Dutch East-Indies and contemporary Indonesia, the Moluccan Islands and Papua.

key words 

race; racialization; critical race theory; Black Studies; Postcolonial Studies; Gender Studies; Queer Theory; Migration Studies; Animal Studies; Animal Ethics; Animal Advocacy Politics; Environmental Humanities; Political Sociology

RESEARCH GROUPS

EDGE (VUB) 

BIRMM (VUB) 

Race-Religion Constellation (Radboud University)