Co-creative methodologies enhance the societal relevance of education, and students benefit from partnerships in which they collaborate with their teachers on the design of their education. But co-creation practices come with a new challenge, to make these practices inclusive. By introducing student partners and student-teacher teams, SPiCE-UCU will (1) bring to all our students co-creation practices that currently only our most daring students engage in with our most innovative teachers, (2) develop ways to do this in a manner that suits our specific learning community, and (3) distil encouraging and practical methods which can benefit other institutions.

This proposal is for a new undergraduate interdepartmental level 3 course in Forensic Linguistics (FL) that combines academic learning with community engagement. FL is a dynamic subject that bridges language, law, psychology, and criminology, aligning with University College Utrecht’s liberal arts mission. It investigates how language is used in forensic settings, as well as its effects on people, institutions, and praxis. It will be the first FL course of its kind in mainland Europe. It targets social inequality through collaborative pedagogy and research with community and judicial organisations. This will be monitored, evaluated, and showcased through a new ‘task force’, ‘FLEX’ (Forensic Linguistic EXperiences), comprised of students, community stakeholders, and individuals who have experienced language-based challenges in forensic and institutional contexts. Our focus includes high attrition rates in Domestic Violence (DV) cases (DV is a key objective of the combined Dutch Ministries of Justice, Health, and Municipalities 2019-2021), linguistic disadvantage in witness/suspect interactions with police and prosecutors, and the manifestation of power and power asymmetries on real case outcomes. The proposed programme is educationally innovative and mutually beneficial for students, teachers, and stakeholders within and outside academia in NL and UK. The FLEX consortium will host a symposium where students will present research and pedagogical experiences. FLEX will provide a platform for knowledge acquisition and transfer, raise awareness of our activities, secure (and continue) collaborative partnerships, and facilitate our students career development. The project will also result in a publication that reflects on the educational innovations of this FL course.

Current research on secularity no longer understands the secular as the decline of the religious. Rather, secularity refers to a particular configuration of religion, state, society, and science. By retracing configurations of secularity in contemporary India, the proposed research will contribute a much needed empirical and cross-cultural perspective to a largely theoretical debate focused on Europe and North America. Taken as an analytical category, secularity permits to uncover the cultural foundations of contemporary forms of religion and non-religion alike. For this purpose, anthropological fieldwork in the environment of a south Indian centre for atheism will be combined with philological analyses of the as yet hardly researched literary genre of Indian spiritual non-fiction. With recourse to new institutional theories it will be possible to fathom not only the ideological, but also the pragmatic and material aspects of secularity and retrace how they translate into concrete practices of individuals.

Dutch drug policies since the Second World War have oscillated between tolerance and repression of drug use. However, whether tolerant or restrictive, pragmatic or moralistic, from a historical perspective drug policies in the Netherlands have shown a structural undercurrent of increasing regulation, despite their internationally (in)famous reputation in leading in the decriminalization of drug use and in harm-reduction public health policies. In other Western countries, too, increased institutionalised interventions in drug use have gone hand in hand with fluctuations in strategies and approaches. The development of, and swings within, the regulatory imperative have been inadequately explained, as researchers are focused too narrowly on a univocal - and unique - national drug policy-making process. Current studies, moreover, often lack historical depth. In contrast, this project broadens the research scope and investigates drug regulation in the Netherlands as historically resulting from the interaction with several important areas: the development of drug economies, shifting public perceptions about drug use, and the dynamics of local drug politics. How and to what extent did these economic and socio-cultural settings, and differentiated forms of policy-making, influence and modify Dutch drug regulation? Within this project we will explain the development and intensification of drug regulatory regimes in the post-war period. Moreover and crucially, we will relate Dutch drug regulatory regimes to European and transnational developments. Finally, the results of this innovative approach and its implications for research and policy will be integrally disseminated and discussed, with both academic colleagues and public stakeholders in the Netherlands and in Europe.

This research project focuses on the bottom-up, female-led peace and reconstruction processes in the Kurdish region of northern Syria. The political and economic roles that women are playing in peace and reconstruction processes are the focal point of analysis. Specifically, the efforts being made by local women and womens organisations in delivering social services, security, and good governance in this fragile and conflict-affected environment. Through this research we will identify entry-points for development organizations to tailor their efforts to the local needs of women in the region in a conflict and gender-sensitive way. Furthermore, based on the data collected, a policy brief, and a conflict and gender-sensitive policy framework will be developed that will not only offer evidence-based knowledge on the nexus between gender and non-state actors, but which will also provide a practical tool to enhance development efforts in the region. The policy framework, although based on context-specific knowledge gained from fieldwork in Syrian Kurdistan, will offer recommendations on how to better evaluate and support womens agency in peace and reconstruction efforts in other fragile and conflict-affected regions.