Projects

In recent years, U+2018volunteeringU+2019 has become an object of intensified public interest and promotion, including intensive efforts to manage it in U+2018effectivelyU+2019 and U+2018professionallyU+2019. Scholars of volunteering often tend to support these efforts though instrume

Since 2015 more than one million Syrians have fled to Europe. Government officials increasingly seem to consider sending them U+2018backU+2019 as soon as the Syrian conflict calms down. Yet where do Syrians themselves think they belong? The home they left behind is

Teachers have been ascribed a central role in studentsU+2019 learning and development. Especially how
teachers relate to their students was proposed as a key factor explaining learning effects and
teacher effectiveness. However, recent meta-analytic research suggests that teachersU+2019 self-efficacy
and personality traits show only small associations with student academic performance.
TodayU+2019s thinking in education ...

Despite efforts to destigmatise mental health care seeking, talking
about psychological problems and seeking professional help,
generally remain taboo among Flemish adolescents. In this project
we will explore how teenagers think about mental health problems,
what stigmatising attitudes they develop and what kind of help
seeking they advise to their peers. To date, Flemish adolescentsU+2019
stigmatising attitudes ...

Although people in poverty are formally entitled to welfare rights, recent research shows that they
often do not take up these rights in practice. Hence, this research project aims to acquire thorough
insights in the complex processes at play in the (non-)take-up of welfare rights in situations of
poverty and to examine the role of social work in this context. The project builds on three basic
premises: (1) it captures the ...

This is the first study exploring the relation between precarious work and the platform economy in Belgium and the Netherlands. It focuses on the work reality of ‘digital workers’ (i.e. platform workers, gig workers, freelancers like bloggers), who are mostly self-employed and increasingly required to perform uncompensated (or unpaid) work (e.g. creating and updating online profiles to establish a reputation, doing preparatory work to compete ...

Since the 1980s countries such as Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK have been experiencing growing numbers of political advisers along with new patterns of institutionalizing partisan involvement in governing. The suggested study argues that this reflects a process of cabinetisation defined as the process by which that part of the internal to government policy advisory system, which comprises ministerial offices, evolves ...

This project involves an interdisciplinary historical analysis of the sex trade. It approaches prostitution from a multi-layered perspective that integrates subaltern history, social geography and economic sociology to situate the shifts of the trade on a double axial system: time and space; and socio-political and economic dimensions. As such, the envisaged research will introduce an unconventional and challenging methodology to the ...