Dr F. Cerchiaro (Francesco)
Assistant professor - Gender & Diversity
I am an Assistant Professor in the Gender and Diversity Department at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Sociological Research (CeSO) at KU Leuven in Belgium. I earned my PhD in Social Sciences (2013) from the University of Padua, Italy where I worked until 2018. Before moving to Nijmegen in January 2023, I have worked at KU Leuven as Marie Curie fellow (2018-2020) and as FWO (Flanders Research Foundation) senior fellow (2020-2022).
As a cultural sociologist I see sociology (and social theory) not as a reflection of reality but as an hermeneutic science in search of an interpretation, and, thus, a reconstruction of reality itself. Interested in the way people make meaning of their lives I have developed my research in two main research strands.
My main strand of research inquired the intersection of family, migration and religion in everyday people’s life. At this regard my research on mixed families and, in particular, on Christian-Muslim families represents a way to examine cultural diversity and the wider social changes including the role of masculinity and migrant fatherhood, the relation between emotions and migration, Muslim diaspora and religious pluralism in Europe. Next to my research on mixed families, my second strand of research focuses on the so called “romantic turn” and its cultural consequences in the West by means of the ways people re-signify religious symbols and cultural practices. This is exemplified by my research on a pagan/religious rogation in Italy and on the online popularization of off-grid living. My research is characterized by qualitative methods, including life stories and ethnography.
My works have been published in leading journals of sociology of religion, migration, gender, sociological theory, and, based on my PhD thesis, I have published the book Love and borders. Mixed couples amongst Islam, children’s education and everyday life (Guida Ed., 2016).
See my publications below