Gunhild Odden

Background

Gunhild Odden holds a PhD in Sociology and a Master's degree in International Migration and Interethnic Relations from the University of Poitiers in France. She has also studied at the University of Salamanca in Spain. Gunhild has been employed as a researcher at SIK since 2010 and has been the director since 2015. Her research and teaching activities relate to migration and intercultural relations. Her PhD dissertation looked at how migrants invest and shape urban space, through, for example, informal and formal economic activity, in parallel with maintaining ties to the country of origin and, thus, creating transnational spaces. The dissertation is based on a social anthropological fieldwork consisting of interviews and observation over several years.

In recent times, Gunhild has researched Afghan and Polish migrant families in the Norwegian welfare state and conflict resolution among minority families. In the period 2016-2019, she is leading the project "Doing Family across Borders: A Comparative Study of Work, Family and Welfare Strategies among Polish Migrants in Norway, Sweden, and the UK", funded by the Research Council of Norway. Gunhild is also the author of the Norwegian book "Introduction to International Migration" (Internasjonal migrasjon. En samfunnsvitenskapelig innføring), that was published in 2018

Keywords

• Migration and health
• Migration and family
• Work migration
• Transnational migration