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Zakia Essanhaji

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Organization Sciences

Assistant Professor, Network Institute

Assistant Professor, Research Programmes - Social Sciences, Organization & Processes of Organizing in Society (OPOS)

Personal information

I am an assistant professor of organizational change in the department of organization studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Prior to that, I have held postdoc and junior reseacher positions at the department of Sociology of VU (2020-2024), junior lecturer and junior researcher positions in Sociology at Erasmus University (2017-2020) and junior researcher in diversity & gender at Radboud University (2019-2020). My background is in sociology; I hold a master's degree in urban studies (cum laude) and a research master degree in the Sociology of Culture, Media and the Arts (cum laude) from Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Research

My research focuses on diversity politics, the dynamics of whiteness, and institutional change within academic contexts, with a focus on the intersections of ethnic-racial and gender inequalities. To that end, I combine critical race, feminist and decolonial perspectives to understand the academy as a key site where ethnic-racial and gender inequalities are being (re)produced. For my dissertation (PhD degree in Sociology, obtained in 2023 at VU) and postdocs (department of Sociology, VU, 2022-2024), I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in and across Dutch universities where I conducted observations of diversity events, critical discourse analysis of diversity policy documents, and interviews with diversity practitioners as well as academics marginalized on the basis of gender, ethnicity/race, religion, sexuality and body-ableness. In my work, I draw attention to the limitations of diversity policies for enacting structural and meaningful change while also exploring the possibilities for reimagining and being in academia otherwise. Some of my publications discuss embodying a diversity problem, white time politics in diversity policies and diversity as complaint work. Currently, I am working on how the intersection of gender, race/ethnicity and religion shapes the experiences of academics of colour and Muslim academics in higher education

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