Petroleum-derived synthetics might be very efficient in keeping people dry, but reliance on non-renewable textiles for outdoor leisure is unsustainable. Synthetic Adventures explores the cultural drivers for the growth of outdoor clothing consumption in the face of complex environmental problems. Observing designers and consumers, Synthetic Adventures asks whether normative understandings of weather perpetuate unsustainability in the apparel industry. A focus on weatherproof apparel highlights what decarbonising clothing cultures means in practice and offers pathways to understanding cultural and social barriers to addressing the climate challenge.

Racialized Dutch academics are excluded in universities in the Netherlands, especially in permanent positions. Mandatory quotas for this specific group are therefore indispensable, as established by scientific evidence in other contexts. Our project will form the building blocks for the large-scale implementation of these quotas, by 1) establishing a supportive network for racialized staff; 2) gaining insights into the resistance to quotas in the Netherlands, and the successful implementation of quotas in other contexts; and 3) applying these insights to the Dutch context.

Since 1945 Dutch design has evolved into an influential creative industry in the Dutch economy. This research aims to understand the meanings and functions of the increasingly expanding field of Dutch design, 1945-2010. It will contribute to developing a scientific theoretical-methodological framework for studying design in its social contexts.

This research considers (1) the constitution of racial figures through the ‘colour line’ at the inception of modernity, and (2) their mobilisation in contemporary discourse on Dutch identity and space. I trace how Iberia, the main enemy of the Dutch Republic, was discursively constructed in terms of religion and race through the XVI century Black Legend in order to analyse how the emergent Dutch republic and its peoples were constituted as white in opposition to Iberia. I subsequently examine how such racial figures emerge in the post-WWII spatial imagination in the Netherlands. My research question is two-fold: How are Jews and Muslims understood in terms of the colour line, i.e. how do they relate to the figure of ‘the Black’ at the inception of Dutch modernity?; and: How are these blackened subjects spatially configured in contemporary Netherlands? The aim of this research is to provide a historically informed account of race-making in the Netherlands. This will be done through an analysis of the XVI and XVII century archives of cultural representations produced in the context of violent encounters with Spain and Portugal. This archive serves as a fundamental source for the understanding of the current social construction of space in the Netherlands. The objectives of this project are to investigate the relation between the Black Legend archive of representations and the Black, the Jew and the Muslim as figures of race in Dutch modernity, and to account for the mobilisation of these figures within the contemporary spatial imagination in the Netherlands. This scholarly analysis is innovative and necessary in the current historical juncture as it focuses on anti-Black racism inflected through religion, and how both operate in today’s spatial imagination. As such, it is significant for current public debates on national identity in the Netherlands and abroad.

This project aims to redefine the history of socialist responses to migration by going beyond Eurocentric perspectives. It connects primary sources from different regions and brings together scholarly literature from different fields to challenge simplistic economic explanations and reveal the racialized aspects of solidarity across labour and socialist movements between 1880 and 1914. In doing so, it highlights the impact of racist movements and anti-Asian campaigns in Australia, Southern Africa, and the Americas on socialist views of migration in Western Europe. The project’s transnational approach aims to enhance historical understanding and provide insights into contemporary debates on migration and integration.