About
When coming to the Ghent University in 2003, it was mainly Ms. Tine Vekemans's love for language and the desire to learn something entirely new that motivated her to choose Eastern Languages and Cultures. She discovered the wonderful world of Hindi, Sanskrit, and Arabic. As time went by, she got more and more interested in modern South-Asian politics and religions and in South-Asian Migrant communities. She graduated in 2007 with a master thesis titled Hindutva and the Dalits, analyzing the ways in which the Hindu religious-nationalist movements try to incorporate the lower castes and outcasts. After graduating, Tine worked in the migration-sector as a translator and as an intercultural advisor. It is from that backdrop that she started her PhD-research into the development of diasporic networks within South-Asian migrant-communities and the effect of these changing networks on cultural identity and religion.The case she researches is the Jain-diaspora.