Tessa Bonduelle is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the project Prototyping Welfare in Europe: Experiments in State and Society, led by Anouk de Koning.

Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, Tessa’s work focuses on constructions of state and nation, exploring how welfare interventions in Europe imagine and shape collectivities.

Tessa received her PhD from the University of Toronto, in a Joint Educational Placement with l’Université Paris 8, where she researched the model of state-outsourced social work in France’s asylum system. Her dissertation explored how French not-for-profit organisations sheltering asylum seekers and resettling refugees on behalf of the French state emerged as essential players in mediating “crisis” and dissipating state failures, including unfulfilled republican promises.

Before joining the Prototyping Welfare project, Tessa spent a year teaching sociology at l’Université Gustave Eiffel in France.

As part of the Prototyping Welfare in Europe project, Tessa is currently exploring how local welfare solutions reshape sociopolitical relations in Britain, in practice. Taking food provisioning in two London boroughs as a starting point, Tessa examines what collective arrangements emerge when provisioning actors attempt to address residents’ needs in a context of protracted crisis and uncertainty.