Currently, she is the research director of the Programme on Gender and Global Change (PGGC) at the
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. She also is the director of the
PhD programme Gender Studies in francophone Switzerland (CUSO).
Previously, she has held positions at Radboud University Nijmegen (Department of Research
Methodology) and Leiden University (Women and Autonomy Center (VENA)) in the Netherlands,
and at the University of Neuchâtel and the Graduate Institute of Development Studies Geneva (where
she was vice-director between 2005-2007) in Switzerland.
As visiting professor she taught and conducted research at the University Mohamed V (Rabat,
Morocco), the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa (México DF) and has been involved
in the South-African Netherlands Programme on Alternatives in Development (SANPAD) between
2002 and 2013.
Since 2010 she has co-coordinated three major research projects on “Gender, Agrarian Transformation
and Rural Development”, the latest of which “Gender, Land and the Right to Food” was launched in
March 2015 and aims to increase knowledge about ways to empower women and men to exercise their
rights to gender equality and food in areas undergoing land commercialization and agrarian transition
in Ghana and Cambodia (www.demeter.research.info).
During the 1990s and early 2000s she has conducted various research projects in the field of sexual
and reproductive health and rights in countries as diverse as Morocco, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Mali,
Burkina Faso, Niger and México. The biography she wrote (1998) of a young Moroccan immigrant
woman in the Netherlands torn between two cultural systems is about to be produced as a film.