Laura Vermeulen is an Assistant Professor of Meaningful Living and Chaplaincy Studies at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht. A medical anthropologist, Laura draws on ethnographic research and action research to study intertwinements of belonging and place in Northern European welfare states. More specifically, she engages questions of belonging, ageing, potentiality and generationality to explore how people gather worlds and meaning in the face of loss.  

Her PhD dissertation, Responding to Dementia, traces the critical potential of responsive envelopments with radical alterity in lives with dementia, drawing on a five year spanning fieldwork among community-dwelling people with dementia who lived alone in a big city in the Netherlands. Financed by the Long-Term Care and Dementia Partnership, the study suggests that the societal anxiety surrounding dementia may be expressive of an ineptness at dealing with the indeterminacy showing in many of our lives, and how place-based practices people with dementia draw on to gather their worlds may hold the political potential to unsettle normative notions of being, relationality and time. Her second project, funded by ZonMw (2019), studied networked socialities in life with dementia from the perspective of people with dementia, their loved ones, family members, friends and professional practice.

Before joining the University of Humanistic Studies, and alongside a post-doctoral affiliation with the University of Amsterdam, Laura worked as a programme coordinator at the academic field lab the Ben Sajet Centre. Laura received her PhD in cultural anthropology, her MSc in Social Sciences (research), and her BSc in Sociology from the University of Amsterdam.

Laura Vermeulen is a convener of the UHS chaplaincy and dementia network, and is a member to the Dutch Humanist Society’s appointment advisory committee. In her capacity as a member of the UHS study group on polarisation she currently sets up a study with residents of refugee centre areas.

Laura’s research interests include: 

Psychological anthropology and critical phenomenology, borders, thresholds and human bounding, alterity and ontology, polarisation and nativism, decolonial approaches to ethics and moral deliberation, plurality and critical humanism, meaning making and health, ageing and generational approaches to care.