Dr Maja Hertoghs works at the anthropology department of the University of Amsterdam as assistant professor where she teaches in the field of gender and sexuality studies. In September 2019 she defended her dissertation, Intensities of the State, on the bureaucratic infrastructures of the Dutch asylum procedure, especially in the detention center near Schiphol airport. She followed application processes for years and especially focused on the work of the procedure’s professionals – the IND, asylum lawyers and the refugee council – and how their (different) ways of engaging with asylum applicants shapes an asymmetrically intimate and ruthless practice of ‘objective’ decision-making. She is currently working on publishing papers about compassion and suspicion, passionate bureaucracies, state work and affects of objectivity. 

In this project, Maja is exploring new research avenues focused on politics of (in)hospitality in relation to queer refugees in Nordic European countries. She is looking into ways in which queer tourists and (illegalized) queer refugees are ‘un/welcomed’ in cities mythologized as gay-paradise like Reykjavik and Amsterdam.