Gunhild Odden

Gunhild Odden holds a PhD in sociology and a master's degree in international migration and ethnic 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 served as the center leader since 2015. Her research and teaching activities focus on migration and intercultural relations. Her PhD thesis examined how migrants invest in and shape urban space through, for example, informal and formal economic activity, while maintaining ties with their country of origin, thereby creating transnational spaces. The thesis is based on social anthropological fieldwork consisting of interviews and observation conducted over several years. More recently, Gunhild has researched Afghan and Polish families in the Norwegian welfare state and conflict management among minority families. From 2016 to 2019, she led the NFR-funded project "Doing Family across Borders: A Comparative Study of Work, Family and Welfare Strategies among Polish Migrants in Norway, Sweden, and the UK.” Gunhild is also the author of the textbook "International Migration. A Social Science Introduction" (2018).