How do (children of) Turkish-Dutch migrants generate heritage through practices of storytelling, archiving/collecting, and performing rituals, to negotiate a sense of belonging and home? This research investigates how grassroots heritage practices related to the Turkish-Dutch history of guest labour interweave past, present and future to challenge reductive narratives about migration and identity. A multimodal ethnographic study of art and heritage case-studies will uncover creative forms of transforming, preserving and expressing belonging and home, ultimately aiming to democratize Turkish-Dutch heritage and Dutch heritage at large.

Morocco is emerging as a leader in Africa’s adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), leveraging its strategic location and initiatives to address local challenges in agriculture, healthcare, and education. However, its contributions are often overlooked in global AI conversations, dominated as they are by Western perspectives. With the EU’s new AI Act aiming to set global standards, critical questions arise about its impact on countries like Morocco: Does it foster collaboration or impose constraints? This study explores Morocco’s AI ecosystem, examining how local knowledge and priorities integrate with global regulations and proposing inclusive frameworks to empower innovation in the Global South.

Despite research into minoritized groups’ homes, and attempts to diversify heritage policies and practices, many initiatives remain stuck on ‘us’/’them’ oppositions governing authorized heritage discourses and its forms of exclusion. But ‘home’ cannot be reduced to such an opposition: we remember earlier homes and traveling away from them; we make ‘home’ where we are with those memories, but also with future wishes en desires; and under conditions shaped by others. Looking at heritage through this more complex lens, we ask how it may help reforming and democratizing authorized heritage-talk and its associated practices.

Digital technologies and religion have more in common than meets the eye, as they each produce futures in both the professional and popular imagination. Secularists have long described religion scathingly, as ‘backward’, and the fate of faith as sealed. If it was ever absent, faith is now back in public, and its future is digital. Islam offers a thought-provoking case, not only as major world-religion, but also as the ‘liberation theology’ of the global South. The ideal of an Islamic information society spearheading the latest technologies offers a model for an alternative to the dominant pathways of digital transition: Californian ‘big-tech’, Chinese social credit system, or European regulation. The |0100| Project investigates the Islamic Information Society’s most debated component – artificial intelligence – with multimodal and mixed methods, comparing and contrasting narratives and imagery of AI-religious-futures in the national settings of Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, each with a considerable yet differently positioned Muslim population. It situates ethical dilemmas surrounding algorithms, bots and machine-learning by ethnographically and longitudinally observing and interviewing makers and users. Innovatively using a historical analysis of future-making discourse, we probe big and ‘thick’ data in situ and through digital ethnography, and use infographics, animations and comics to both map and represent ‘scripted futures’. |0100| delivers salient ethnographic evidence, as well as an overarching socio-anthropological analysis, of what digital everyday religion is like, how Southeast Asians use AI in everyday life, and how digital technology contributes to exciting societal experiments and ethical dilemmas. Studying AI-religious-futures anthropologically means openly and seriously contemplating diverse and multiple possible directions of digitalizing societies. It raises public awareness of the moral decisions implied in how and why we let technology shape our lives, and reminds experts and policymakers about the fact that the future is always configured here and now.

The Leiden University research project ‘Postcolonial Displacements: Migration, Narratives and Place-Making in South Asia’ hopes to benefit from the input of Prof. Palriwala, an internationally renowned sociologist, who has worked extensively on gender and migration in South Asia. This application for a NWO Visitor’s Travel Grant is being filed by dr. Erik de Maaker, one of the two coordinators of that research project. Prof. Palriwala has published in major journals, been a visiting professor in Paris, and been engaged in collaborative teaching and research at major universities in Japan and Germany. Now more than two decades ago, she was a fellow at Institute of Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology and at the International Institute for Asian Studies (Leiden), during which time she taught an undergraduate course and undertook research on gender and social relations in the Netherlands in which migration was a sub-theme . In the context of the four months of fellowship that can be provided by the NWO visitor grant, she will explore questions relating to gender and what are regarded as expected and disruptive displacements (the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’). This will make a vital contribution to the ‘Postcolonial Displacements’ project. She intends to work with research data that she has collected in India, while reconnecting to earlier informants in the Netherlands. Sharing outcomes of her research project, she will also be discussing the materials collected in the ‘Postcolonial Displacements’ project. Through sharing the outcomes of her research and with her expertise in ethnographic methods, Prof. Palriwala will contribute to the further development of the new BA level course that will have been initiated by the Postcolonial Displacements project, and in bridging methodological distances between the Humanities and the Social Sciences at Leiden University. The NWO Visitor’s Travel Grant will enable the involvement of Prof. Palriwala in an international workshop, as an organiser and participant, which will facilitate further international networking and the creation of research cooperatives, drawing on her networks and those of the ‘Displacements’ project team. This input will further feed into the large grant applications that the project coordinators will be working on in spring 2018. In addition to her personal contribution to such an application, Prof. Palriwala can be instrumental in ensuring the involvement of Delhi University (one of the premier academic institutions of India) as a project partner and in taking findings of the project into research and teaching at Delhi University.