Faces & Facets of the GDR

Faces & Facets of the GDR is a research project seeking to shed light on lived experiences that were left in the dark. The GDR collapsed in 1990, history books and the larger narrative focused on the geo-political implications. The stories of ordinary east germans, who went to school, to work and lived a normal life found little attention in the frenzy that was the early 90s. Today, 30 years later, we seek to create a space for the stories of these people, about their GDR. We created a magazine that contains various poems and drawings, trying to showcase each face and facet in detail.

Corona Infodemic

The ongoing stream of misinformation fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced people’s trust in the government and the media. This excessive spread of misinformation also called the “infodemic” has made it difficult for people to tell between what is real and what is fake. Our project aims to understand how people decide what sources of information are reliable and what they see as a fact or an opinion to have a better understanding of how the reactions to the pandemic arise. Take a peek into the lives of 5 people who might be totally different from you! We invite you to try and see things from their point of view, you might have more in common than you think!

Intergenerational Narratives of Womanhood

In the course of our project, Intergenerational Narratives of Womanhood, we investigated personal conceptions of womanhood across generations in Germany and how they are informed by past and current collective, dominant narratives surrounding womanhood. We interviewed German women of different ages, encouraging them to share photographs that express what it means in their eyes to be a woman. Employing expressive images and quotes and further artistic and academic input, we have put together an art book that showcases the results of our research. Join our presentation this presentation day to learn about our qualitative research process and experience visual impressions of personal and collective narratives of womanhood.

Narratives of the decolonisation of Indonesia

Our project is about gathering narratives of the younger generation (18-30) of both Dutch and Indonesian people on the colonisation and decolonisation of Indonesia. We focus on how present this event still is and the conflicting narratives of the event and the aftermath within the countries and between.

Investigating Poland’s culture war; conflicting LGTBQ+ narratives

Last year, in 2020, Poland dropped below the threshold from ‘consolidated democracy’ to ‘semi-consolidated democracy' as per the new Freedom House Index. This development comes after Poland’s ruling party PiS has taken several steps to weaken the independence of the judiciary branch. Sliding back on nearly all ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ indicators towards a more populist and authoritarian government, or ‘illiberal democracy’, Poland specifically is an interesting case study. There seems to be a ‘culture war’ of sorts, in which multiple traditional and progressive narratives clash with each other. Recently, some proposals have been considered in the Polish parliament that threaten the rights of Poland’s LGBTQ+ citizens. This led to a visible discrepancy between different groups in Poland. To further investigate this, we conducted qualitative research in order to understand how young Polish people develop particular opinions and stances on the LGTBQ+ movement in Poland.