Lecturers

Introduction to Narrative Research and the Arts

This opening lecture introduces participants to the field of narrative research across the social sciences and humanities, highlighting how stories shape knowledge, identities, and social realities. Narrative inquiry allows us to trace meaning-making processes, imagine possible futures, and critically examine the ways stories reproduce or challenge power relations. At the same time, the arts offer complementary pathways into experience, emotion, and imagination—engaging senses and modes of expression that often move beyond the reach of words. Together, narrative and the arts provide distinct but overlapping affordances: they can amplify each other, enrich our understanding, and open new spaces for research and practice. Through a blend of conceptual framing and interactive reflection, participants will begin to explore how these modes of inquiry intersect with their own projects, laying the foundation for deeper engagement with narrative–arts combinations throughout the winter school.

Anneke Sools is Associate Professor in Narrative Change Research at the University of Twente. Trained as a psychologist of culture and religion, she has developed as a transdisciplinary researcher. She designs and investigates embodied narrative and artistic methods for transformative experience, specifically for cultural and behaviorial shifts towards life-sustaining futures involving the full web of life (human, more-than-human, technological).

Gerben Westerhof is Professor in Narrative Psychology and Technology and director of the Story Lab at the University of Twente. His main interest is how personal stories contribute to mental health and well-being. He aims to advance theoretical and methodological insights in narrative by interdisciplinary collaboration, for example in developing computational methods for analyzing narratives. He is in continuous dialogue with professionals in care for older adults and mental health care in order to develop, evaluate, and implement narrative interventions. An example is the recently published intervention An Empowering Story (Een Sterk Verhaal).

What if my research lived in Lord of the Rings? A workshop to twist your research practice through visual storytelling in fantasy worlds

Elise Talgorn, Silvana Beerends-Pavlovic & Jochem Kootstra

This workshop invites participants to step beyond rational frameworks and reimagine their research projects through fantasy worlds. By shifting from logical and technical modes of thinking toward creative, intuitive, and emotional exploration, participants engage with arts-based methods to uncover new perspectives. Choosing a fictional setting—such as The Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Minecraft, or Alice in Wonderland—they will ask: how would characters encounter my research? What problems might it solve in their world? What unexpected ethical or social questions could emerge? Using visual storytelling tools—drawing, collage, comics, or annotated sketches—research is reframed in playful and surprising ways. This process not only sparks innovative ideas but also highlights dimensions often hidden in conventional approaches, showing how fantasy can be a powerful medium for reflection, imagination, and expanding the ways we understand and communicate research.

Elise Talgorn is a multidisciplinary researcher and artist dedicated to fostering compassionate connections between people, nature, and technology. With a PhD in renewable energy physics, she worked in sustainable innovation and strategy at Philips, combining expertise in planet-centered design, systems thinking, and narrative sciences. She is currently Associate Professor in Social Impact Storytelling at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, where her research explores how story-based experiences stimulate creativity, connectedness, and solidarity across human and more-than-human worlds. As an independent artist, she creates paintings and comics that bring humor and emotion to the voices of the more-than-human.

Silvana Beerends-Pavlovic holds a Master in Social & Cultural Sciences, and specializes in strategic communication. After working as a strategist at an international communication agency in Brussels for more than ten years, advising different non-profit and for-profit clients, she hold the role of senior lecturer Storytelling at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and is lead of the Storyhackers Challenges. This programme focuses on the role of stories in personal and systemic transformation, exploring knowledge and practice in deconstructing and reconstructing narrative to challenge and hack the current status quo.

Jochem Kootstra is an anthropologist and media & communication scholar whose work explores how people, technology, and digital culture intersect and reshape social and cultural dynamics, with a focus on ethical and civic implications. He is a researcher and lecturer at Communication & Creative Business and the Civic Interaction Design research group at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, where he explores systems thinking in relation to the societal impact of digital platforms. He is also pursuing a PhD at the University of Amsterdam on digital counter-mapping as a tool for activism, storytelling, and socio-spatial transformation.

Narrative Literacy for Wicked Problems

Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar & Steven Willemsen

Contemporary societal challenges—such as climate change, energy transition, global inequality, and information polarization—are increasingly recognized as wicked problems: complex, multifaceted, and resistant to simple solutions. These problems defy linear reasoning and require multiperspectival, context-sensitive approaches. In this workshop, we will critically assess the use value of narrative when responding to wicked problems. While narrative has emerged as a powerful means of engaging publics and shaping understanding, its use is double-edged: it can foster complexity-awareness and empathy, but also oversimplify, distort agency, and encourage biased sense-making. Therefore, we need, alongside our narrative competency —i.e. the ability to storify our life experiences— a narrative literacy: the capacity to critically reflect on how our mind creates stories, and stories create our mind. Through exercises, we will explore how play can be a vital tool to engage in this kind of reflection on narrative meaning-making. 

Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar is Senior Lecturer at the university of Groningen where he chairs the Arts, Narrative and Cognition theme group. He is actively involved in and publishes about the establishment of an applied narratology: a bridge between theory and practices of narrative. Recent publications include Narrative Values, the Value of Narratives (De Gruyter 2024, co-edited with Barend van Heusden), a special issue of the journal Narrative Inquiry on applied narratology (2024, co-edited with Laura Karttunen and Anna Ovaska), and a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory on narrative literacy (2025, co-edited with Jan Alber and Cecilia Thirlway).

Steven Willemsen is Assistant Professor in Art, Culture & Media at the University of Groningen, and an Affiliated Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He has previously been a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Research Centre for Literature and the Mind, is author of Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (Edinburgh University Press 2017, with Miklós Kiss) and editor of Puzzling Stories: The Aesthetic Appeal of Cognitive Challenge in Film, Television & Literature (Berghahn Books, 2022).

Good translations in combining qualitative research and the arts: The case of a dramaturgical approach to convey counternarratives of service users in long term care

Marjolijn Heerings & Roman Giling

How can we think of quality in projects where qualitative research and the arts are combined? If we accept the premise that we can develop quality criteria to assess qualitative research (e.g. Mays & Pope, 20000): how to think of  ‘the good’ in projects that combine such research with the arts? In this workshop we investigate this question by thinking with the concept of ‘loose translation’ developed by Michael Guggenheim (2015). If we think of different steps taken in such projects as ‘loose translations’ how can we say something about the quality of those translations? We argue the language of quality criteria in qualitative research is unable to fully capture issues of ‘goodness’ in translations made in projects that include the arts. Instead we need to include other logics about thinking of quality such as developed in the fields of playwriting; (theatrical)performance or cinema. Using different logics combined however also raises tensions. In this workshop we present our thoughts on this subject by presenting our preliminary analysis of the case of a dramaturgical approach to convey counternarratives of service users in long term care. Furthermore we engage in reflective exercises using your own projects as examples to think about the loose translations, their qualities and tensions in different logics used therein.

Marjolijn Heerings is assistant professor at the healthcare governance group at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Her research centers around the question how clients, professionals and family members can co-create quality in long term care. For this purpose she developed the method: ‘Ask Us!’ (www.alsjehetonsvraagtdan.nl) which includes reflection on small videoclips which she developed through ethnographic research and collaboration with an inclusive theatre company: Theater Babel Rotterdam. Marjolijn furthermore is co-founder and boardmember of Kwalitatief Onderzoekscollectief GGZ (www.koggz.nl) which aims to foster qualitative research in the mental healthcare field.

Roman Giling is a visual anthropologist and filmmaker. He works as a PhD student at the healthcare governance group at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. With a combination of qualitative research methodologies and cinematography he attempts to bridge the gap between science and art. His research focusses on how visual methodologies can be utilized in the research and conveyance of patient experience. He previously worked on the module ‘Living with psychotic experience’ for the website PratenOverGezondheid (talking about health). He is also a member of the board of officers of Health Experiences International.

Art Dialogues: Narrative Paths in Art-Based Learning

This 2.5-hour session introduces participants to Art-Based Learning (ABL) as a method for narrative exploration and meaning-making. After a short introduction, the core of the session (90 minutes) is an experiential ABL practice in an art exhibition, on campus or online in a digital  environment. Participants engage in a structured encounter with a selected artwork, allowing space for slowing down, deep looking, and narrative imagination. Through guided prompts and reflection, the artwork becomes a dialogue partner, opening unexpected perspectives on personal and professional questions. The process emphasizes resonance, embodied attention, and narrative emergence rather than analytical interpretation. Following the practice, we transition into a research presentation and group discussion, situating Art-Based Learning within narrative theory and palliative care contexts, during which participants are invited to share their questions. Together, we reflect on how receptive arts experiences can support modes of meaning-making at the edge of contingency.

Shailoh Phillips (she/they) is an artist, educator, and participatory action researcher currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Twente, in collaboration with ArtEZ, and Amsterdam UMC in the transdisciplinary project The Art of Creating New Stories: Working with Art-Learning in Palliative Care, focused on supporting meaning-making processes for people living with incurable cancer. With a background in cultural anthropology, philosophy, and education in arts, Shailoh brings over 20 years of experience working across museums, media, and community initiatives. She is co-initiator of Reschooling With, a learning community for regenerative and decolonial practices. Their work integrates participatory methods, ecology education, narrative inquiry, and critical pedagogies to investigate how creative engagement fosters connection, resilience and collective transformation.

Marike Geurts is a PhD student at Amsterdam UMC. Her research is part of the interdisciplinary research project The Art of Creating New Stories: Working with Art-Learning in Palliative Care. She is academically trained as an art and cultural historian. During the Master, she worked for Studio I - platform for inclusive culture, a collaboration between the Van Abbemuseum and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, in which she dealt with inclusion and diversity issues in the cultural sector. During the corona pandemic, she retrained as a nurse with a specialization in elderly care. In her work as a nurse, she gained extensive experience in palliative care. She now combines this broad knowledge and experience in her research on what art-based learning can do for oncology patients receiving palliative care.