Dr. Laure Michon

Laure Michon graduated as a political scientist from the University of Amsterdam in 2001 and worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies (IMES) and a staff member of the Academic Bureau of the Dutch green party GroenLinks before starting my Ph.D. research project. Her dissertation focuses on ethnic minority politicians elected in local councils in Amsterdam and Paris. It explores how they get access to the local political arena, how their careers evolve over time and what their discourses on representation are. More broadly, the focus of the study is on the role of ethnicity in politics. This qualitative study draws on interviews conducted in the early 1990s both in Amsterdam and in the region of Paris, and recent interviews, both with the politicians interviewed in the 1990s and with currently elected ethnic minority politicians.

At MPI-MMG Laure Michon assisted Karen Schönwälder with the follow-up of the conference on ‘Immigrant Political Incorporation in Europe’, co-organised by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and the University of Amsterdam.