Karen Verduijn is Associate Professor at the department of Management and Organization with the School of Business and Economics of VU Amsterdam. Verduijn originally studied business administration at the Rotterdam School of Management and obtained her PhD in 2007 (at VU Amsterdam). She currently serves as a member of the VU work’s council.
Karen’s research focuses on understanding the intricacies and politicality of entrepreneurial processes including the ‘more-than-humans’ involved in it.
Her research contributes to ‘Critical Entrepreneurship Studies’ (CES) and the ‘Entrepreneurship-as-Practice’ (EaP) field. Both CES and EaP make space for more relational, collective, ethical, and context-sensitive understandings of the entrepreneurship phenomenon.
Karen is former (co-)editor-in-chief of the Scandinavian Journal of Management (2021-2023), and she has served as guest editor for special issues in Organization (2012), the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research (2014), and Entrepreneurship Education & Pedagogy (2020).
She is (co-)editor of Routledge’s edited volume on ‘Critical Perspectives on Entrepreneurship’ (2017) and Edward Elgar’s Research Handbook of Critical Entrepreneurship Studies (2026).
Karen has a long track record in critical education renewal and educational leadership. She has edited a book and published several articles in this area, and she has developed several programmes, acted as programme director, as examination board chair, and as project leader of a European education-related project (via Erasmus+), amongst others.
She was Education Research Fellow at Vrije Universiteit from 2022-2024, and is co-founder and coordinator of ‘Plato’s Garden’, a platform for nature-based pedagogical experimentation at VU (founded 2024). Last but not least, she is a member of the VU Education Collective.
She has won a VU Scholarship for Teaching & Learning (SoTL) grant in 2024 for the project “Future-Proof Entrepreneurship Education”. She was (co-)winner of the Sten K. Johnsen European Entrepreneurship Education Award (EEEA) in 2025, and of the VU Education Impact Award in 2026.
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