Publications

In this article we examined the intersection between religious and ethnic border crossing. On the one hand we applied the interactional ‘boundary approach’ of F. Barth, and on the other hand we assessed the process of ethnic passing by the adoption of ‘surface pointers’ (Nash 1996). It appears from our study that for both groups of ‘converts’, from Islam to Evangelism, and from secular Christianity to Islam, the border crossing entails much more ...

This dissertation explores the influence of ethnicity on determining votersU+2019 choices in Tanzania. The issue of explaining ethnicity and voting in Tanzania is puzzling. The puzzle stems from the fact that Tanzania is less ethnically politicised compared to most African states, despite being ethnically diverse with over 120 ethnic groups, sharing the colonial history and an ongoing anxiety about competitive politics and liberal economics ...

This study examines the relation between the ethnic composition of municipalities and the secondary-school completion of the second generation of Italian, Moroccan and Turkish origin and of the Belgian majority. Drawing on random samples from the Belgian census and on contextual data at the level of municipalities, we use multilevel models to compare two competing concepts and measures of ethnic composition. The percentage of ethnic minorities ...

Highly-educated ethnic minority entrants in Western countries need more time to find a job compared to their Western ethnic majority counterparts. The present study examined whether this differential job access is partly explained by the way ethnic minorities present themselves in their resumes. To this means, a comparison between 100 non-Western ethnic minority graduate resumes and 100 native Western ethnic majority graduate resumes was made. ...

In this paper we elaborate on the conceptual premises of studying ethnicity in an ongoing community based participatory research project (Green et al. 1995, Minkler et al. 2004, Israel etal. 2010) about the nature of substance use and access to treatment facilities in the Turkish community in Ghent (Belgium). Due to a lack of prevalence studies in ethnic and cultural minorities in Belgium and to the growing medicalization of research on ...

Gender equality is not fully realised when it is restricted to ethnic majority men and women. This article examines how gender quotas as a form of equality policy affect ethnic minority groups, in particular, the gender balance among ethnic minority candidates for political office. Our analysis focuses on the selection of ethnic minority candidates in Belgium, where legally binding quotas exist, and in the Netherlands, where they do not. Drawing ...

We recently demonstrated differences in fracture incidence by ethnicity in the UK population using the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) [1]. In their letter, Harper et al. [2] draw attention to the differential age structure of the UK population by ethnicity, and suggest that the lower incidence of fractures in Asian adults over 50 years might reflect the lower proportion of very elderly individuals within this demographic compared ...

Starting from a person-environment fit framework, this study investigates whether ethnic congruenceU+2014the percentage of co-ethnics in a schoolU+2014relates to school misconduct, and whether congruence effects differ between ethnic minority and majority students. Moreover, we investigate whether eventual associations are mediated by friendship attachment, perceived teacher support and general school belonging. Multilevel analyses of data from ...

A remarkable process of ethnic engineering has been taking place in neighbouring Burundi and Rwanda. After a failed democratization attempt in the early 1990s, both countries experienced an extremely violent transition process. Despite the many similarities between the two countries, they have adopted radically different approaches to address long-standing ethnic divisions. While Rwanda has opted for a policy based on ethnic amnesia and an ...