Dr F. Cerchiaro (Francesco)

Francesco Cerchiaro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Diversity at Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands), and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Sociological Research (CeSO), KU Leuven (Belgium).

He holds a PhD in Social Sciences (2013) from the University of Padua, Italy. Before joining Radboud University in 2023, he worked at CeSO–KU Leuven between 2018 and 2022.

Since 2010, he has developed an innovative line of research on mixedness, exploring both the identity processes within mixed families and their forms of collective activism. On this topic, he received two prestigious international grants: a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (“ReMix – Christian-Muslim families dealing with religious pluralism in everyday family life”, 2018–2020), investigating Christian–Muslim couples in Belgium and France; and an FWO Senior Fellowship (“Fighting for Love. Mixed/Christian-Muslim Families’ Associations in Belgium, France and Italy”, 2020–2022), focusing on the role of mixed couples’ associations in the public sphere.

More broadly, his work explores how people make meaning of their lives at the intersection of family, migration, religion, and emotion. He has examined how mixed families navigate cultural diversity, how masculinity and migrant fatherhood evolve in transnational contexts, and how emotions shape experiences of belonging.

Two of his current projects focus respectively on high-skilled migrants (in collaboration with RUNOMI and Sector Plan, studying European Commission employees) and on halal dating apps (Faith Meets Swipe, funded by the Dutch Research Council – NWO-XS 2024), investigating them as spaces of moral negotiation and belonging.

Rooted in qualitative methods, particularly life stories and ethnography, his work has been published in leading journals on religion, migration, gender, and sociological theory, contributing to debates on mixedness, masculinity, and the symbolic dimensions of sociological theory.