Laura Keesman is an Assistant Professor at the department of Sociology. She obtained her PhD (2023) at the University of Amsterdam based on a long-term multi-site ethnographic study into violent interactions within the Dutch Police Force between 2017 - 2022, entitled 'Being in Control: Policing Bodies, Emotions and Violence'. She accompanied police teams throughout The Netherlands in different roles: front line policing, riot policing, specialized arresting units, and trainings for police officers and recruits. Her research explicates how the police put control into being on bodily, emotional, discursive and visual levels. In 2022-2023, she was an Assistant Professor at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen department of Sociology.
In the summer of 2023 she received the Early Career-Prize from the European Society of Criminology (ESC) Policing Working Group, specifically for her article The showability of policing: How police officers’ use of videos in organizational contexts reproduces police culture published in European Journal of Criminology. In 2025 she won - together with Dr. Holly Campeau (Waterloo University, Canada) - the Best Paper Prize (ESC) Policing Working Group for their article “You can't really turn it off”: The police “sixth sense” as cultural schema published Open Access in Sociological Forum.
Laura has held several international positions. Currently, since November 2025, she is an affiliate at SciencesPo Paris, LIEPP. In May-July 2025 she was a Visiting Fellow programme laureate at Sciences Po Paris, specifically the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP). In december of 2023 she was a Visiting Scholar at Ghent University (UGent) Belgium, Department of Public Governance & Management, Faculty of Economics & Public Administration, research group 'Governing and Policing Security' (GaPS). In spring of 2022, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Criminological Research (CCR), University of Alberta, Canada.
As of 2025, Laura is a member of the Amsterdam Young Academy working with colleagues from VU and UvA to foster a healthy academic environment. Laura is a member of the Kenniskring Taskforce 'Onze hulpverleners veilig', The Amsterdam Network for the Study of Violent Interactions, The Amsterdam Center for Conflict Studies (ACCS), and The Resilience, Security & Civil Unrest Lab (VU).
In 2023-2024 she was an editor for the Dutch scientific peer-reviewed Journal 'Mens en Maatschappij' Amsterdam University Press. Currently, she on the editorial board for Dutch scientific peer-reviewed Journal Tijdschrift Sociologie.
As a former social worker, having worked 7 years in homeless facilities of the Salvation Army in the Red Light district of Amsterdam, she is interested in how people in occupational settings deal with violence. She also worked as a social worker in a domestic violence shelter in Sioux Falls, South Dakota U.S., boys orphanage in Capetown, South-Africa and as a substitute teacher in primary school and high-school for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties (EBD). She conducted research into the embodied experiences of social workers with violent interactions and antagonistic behaviors. This study was published in Journal of Social Work, entitled: 'Bodies and emotions in tense and threatening situations'. Finally, she worked as a researcher at an independent research agency, focusing on social policy and the intersection of social- and public governance, conducting interdisciplinary research in collaboration with stakeholders.
