Gijs Custers is an assistant professor at the Department of Law, Society and Crime of the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

He is currently developing the following lines of research:

1) How various social processes (e.g., gentrification, racialisation, criminalisation) affect neighbourhood stigma over time, and the role of different actors in this context. Through analysing a large corpus of media articles, Gijs will gain more insight into the causes and consequences of neighbourhood stigma, and how it varies across large scales of time and space.

2) How the label 'mild intellectual disability' (licht verstandelijke beperking) is used in the Dutch criminal justice system 

Gijs further investigates what the effects of social policy are on educational mobility. In particular, he examines what the contribution of the National Program Rotterdam South (NPRZ), one of the largest urban policies in Dutch history, is in improving educational outcomes in Rotterdam.

His previous work includes studies of social inequality in social class, gentrification, neighbourhood effects, and citizen participation.

Gijs is experienced in applying quantitative methods (including matching techniques, multilevel modelling, latent class analysis, and GIS) and qualitative methods (interviewing). He is also interested in how computational text analysis can be used to study representations across time.