Projects
The image as relational space – unfolding agency through photofilmic and performative re-imaginations KU Leuven
Our worldview is increasingly formed through visual media depicting and framing global crises as well as everyday life. Fleeting images on screens, filtered live feeds and virtual realities take over the experience of the/our world. In face of these developments, visual literacy becomes a necessity to orient ourselves, stay in touch with reality and develop new forms of framing, imagining and storytelling. The photofilmic strategies I develop ...
Negotiating consent: patient agency and gynaecological surgery (France and the Netherlands, 1890s-1960s) KU Leuven
Scholars have often depicted the rise of informed consent as a recent development in which patients have achieved (legal) autonomy since the 1960s. This project challenges the view that patients had (almost) no autonomy before the post-war period. It aims to provide a long-term historical perspective on patient agency in negotiations over consent in France and the Netherlands from the 1890s until the 1960s. Gynaecological surgery will serve ...
Negotiating consent: patient agency and gynaecological surgery (France and the Netherlands, 1890s-1960s) KU Leuven
Students and their understanding of and opinions about agency in the past. Case-study: poverty in a historical perspective. KU Leuven
Through a qualitative research design, with a pre- and double posttest-design and intervention (consisting of introductory lessons, an exhibition visit and a concluding lesson), the effect is measured of a lesson series on poverty in Belgium since 1800 aimed at explicit teaching about agency (a crucial concept of 'historical thinking'). The effect is examined, via different interventions (with and without exhivition visit, with and without ...
Tutor ac Nutritor. Episcopal Agency, Lordship and the Administration of Religious Communities in the Ecclesiastical Province of Rheims (c. 888 -1073) KU Leuven
My dissertation focuses on interactions between tenth-century bishops and religious communities in the church province of Rheims, between c. 888 and 1073. It offers new insight on the history of the early medieval Frankish kingdoms, more specifically, on the concept of monastic reform, the relations between abbeys and bishops, the post-Carolingian political transformation and the mechanisms of lordship. The main goal of this research can be ...
An agency graded theory of crime. An integrated explanation of the onset and endphase of youth crime. KU Leuven
Criminological theory has primarily taken on the task of examining ‘determining’ features – actors’ so called structure – as causal factors forcrime. The individual actor amid of this causality and his ‘choice’ to commit crime – captured by the notion of human agency – are however obscured from these etiological explanations. Nevertheless, the criminal actor’s choice – or responsibility – is actually one of criminal law’s mostessential ...
A Pragmatic Reality: The Performance and Codification of Collective Agency in the ‘Age of Freedom’ of Urban Communities in the Southern Low Countries and Northern France (late 11th - early 13th Centuries) Ghent University
Research on the early development of urban communities in Western Europe has long been determined by a political and institutional approach of the liberties, laws and customs these communities were granted by their rulers in the form of so-called ‘borough charters’. As a result of this narrow focus, we still remain ignorant of the pragmatic context in which these laws and rights were negotiated and materialized, of the socio-economic ...
Rebel Soldiers on Trial: Military Agency and its Repression in Colonial Congo (1885-1960) Vrije Universiteit Brussel
martials (Conseils de Guerre) of colonial Congo (1885-1960) to study
the rebellions and mutinies of Congolese soldiers and their
repression. This project constitutes a ground-breaking enquiry on the
deployment of violence within the colonial armed forces of subSaharan Africa. It brings to the fore the complex and multifaceted
nature of ...
Post-conflict divided cities and the agency of space: the case of Belfast KU Leuven
Post-conflict divided cities are a common phenomenon, especially since the 20th century shift in conflicts from interstate to intrastate, which led to the further increase and articulation of polarized and ethnically divided cities. This phenomenon has been studied by various disciplines. Nevertheless, the examination from the perspective of urban space is still in short supply. We will address this knowledge gap through the study of the role ...