Laura Van Beveren has a background in Social work & Social pedagogy and in Conflict & Development studies. Her master's dissertation, "Social commitment in contemporary arts: a rhetorical analysis of The New Forest by Wunderbaum" (2015), studied the potential of socially engaged arts to make social work students/professionals reflect critically on how social change and social justice is pursued and created in the arts and in social work.  

In 2016, Laura Van Beveren started working as a BOF research fellow at the Culture & Education research group (Departement of Educational Studies) at Ghent University. Her Phd-research, "Critical reflection in the social and behavioural sciences: a rhetorical approach", studies how rhetorical and artistic perspectives can function to inform practices of critical reflection in the social and behavioural sciences. In this study, Laura is specifically focusing on educational settings in the disciplines of social work, teacher education and clinical psychology.

In the Mentally project, she is involved in the rhetorical/linguistic study of the public debate on mental health in different European contexts.