Research projects

This page provides an overview of active research projects at the Meertens Institute. See the Research page for a general description of the research we are engaged in.

Recently completed projects will remain on this page for some time. Looking for all completed research projects for 2018-2024? You can find them here.

Grounded Memories: Metal-detecting as mindful heritage in action

Metal detecting has been recognised as intangible cultural heritage in the Netherlands. However, heritage management still tends to focus primarily on material finds and in archaeological value, rather than on metal detecting as a living practice. In this citizen science project, researchers and the metal detecting community collaborate through a co-creative process on the intersection between the personal experiences of detectorists in Zeeland and scientific study of the artefacts they find. In doing so, the project highlights the emotional, social, and cultural dimensions of metal detecting as a living heritage practice.

A Nose for Heritage: Creative Techniques for Research into Frisian Olfactory Heritage

What does the Dutch province of Friesland smell like – and who gets to have a say in this? How might we identify the scents that are significant to Friesland? In the research project A Nose for Heritage, researchers collaborate with creative designers and perfumers to explore the scents of the Frisian countryside and to bring them to the fore – and to the nose. In doing so, they aim to position smell more clearly within heritage policy.

Afterlives of Slavery

Slavery has left deep wounds that continue to affect the present. Many descendants of enslaved people experience a disrupted relationship with their ancestors. This project, in collaboration with a Winti priestess, a psychiatrist, and genealogists, explores pathways to healing. The goal is to develop an ethnographic method to carry out ancestral research in a holistic way.

Language Variation on Trend: The Social Meaning of Grammar in Youth Language Practices

This project studies Dutch youth language, specifically: to what extent do young people consciously make grammatical “mistakes” when shaping their own youth language? Can grammatical features carry social meaning(s)? And to what extent is grammar related to identity construction?

Rights of Nature: Through the Looking Glass

This project aims to bring researchers from anthropology, social studies of science, and legal scholars to study the Rights of Nature label. This emergent perspective has been materialised in policies mostly in the Global South. Recently, this narrative has been gradually becoming a global movement and is slowly gaining traction in...

VITALGREENHOUSE

This project asks: how is sustainability being conceived and practiced in diverse and competing ways in the greenhouse? To answer these questions, the project deploys an innovative combination of multisited ethnography and more-than-human ethnography.

Botanical Records Through a Social Lens

This project brings together contemporary and historical citizen-science knowledge on the subject of botanical life in the Netherlands. Through this research we aim to enrich the data on biodiversity in the Netherlands and learn more about the relationship between humans and nature over the years.

MAKEBELIEF

This project researches how religion is ‘imagineered’ in religious theme parks in different countries. Which representations of religion are conveyed and how? What are the underlying agendas and how do the parks influence the emotional and political significance of religion and heritage?

INREACH

Which knowledge and perspectives are missing from our archives? The pilot project INREACH takes a critical look at our collections and collection methods. The leading idea is that what we do not read or hear also constitutes an "archive".

The traveling image: the photo of captain Broos

There is only one known photograph of Captain Broos (1821-1880), one of the most significant Surinamese Maroon leaders. This project uses ethnographic methods to study the social life of this photograph in the Netherlands, Ghana, and Suriname, and contributes to research on the power of images in the politics of...

Cow-human Interaction

This project explores the social interactions of dairy cows. In this way it is proposing that the perspective of (non-human) animals should be incorporated into the field of sociolinguistics.

Who is the troll?

This project focuses on developing a game that teaches secondary-school students and senior citizens how artificial intelligence works. Participants take on the role of moderator in an online discussion and can enlist the help of a computer algorithm. In this way they discover the pros and cons of artificial intelligence.

Rethinking the role of water in climate robust landscapes

This project aims at setting up a transdisciplinary study to establish how land and water use practices are interacting with landscape scale biodiversity, water quality, and society. The project starts from current conditions and incorporates future scenarios of climate and societal conditions up to 2050. Water plays a central role...

Cat-human interactions

This research project analyses interactions between domestic cats and the humans they share a household with. How do cats make clear that they want something? And how do cats and their humans establish fixed routines?

Syntax of Dutch

Dutch is one of the best-researched living languages in the world. The Syntax of Dutch provides a comprehensive overview of the syntactic literature on Dutch for a broad international audience at the level of an advanced linguistics student.

Verbeelding in transities

Hoe moeten we nu en in de toekomst omgaan met complexe transitieopgaven zoals de energietransitie, de voedseltransitie, klimaatadaptatie en interne veiligheid? Dit project doet onderzoek naar creatieve onderzoeks- en oplossingsmethodes in de context van grootstedelijke uitdagingen.

Raw Earth Agriculture: Supply Chain Criticism and the Political Cartographies of Food

This project aims to bring researchers, designers, architects, and humanities scholars together - in the form of a workshop - to map the emerging cartographies of exploitation, extraction, and trade promised by the recent EU Critical Raw Materials Act, 2023. (more…)

The use of language and culture in the construction of local identity

This subproject investigates a) the use of language (dialect, regiolect, Dutch) and culture (ritual, festivals, gestures) in the construction of local identity in the Netherlands; b) the contexts in which local identity is experienced and conveyed; and c) the actors involved and their audiences. In doing so, we investigate what...

The Dutch Folktale Database & The Dutch Song Database

The Dutch Folktale Database, which was started in 1994, contains a wealth of folktales (fairy tales, riddles, traditional legends, jokes, contemporary legends) from the Middle Ages until the present day. Each story includes metadata such as the location where it was told, the recorded date, the narrator, and, if possible,...

Folktale repertoires and narrative culture

This long running project deals with a multitude of narrative expressions throughout time: from the performance of medieval tales, the formal structure of fairy tales and testimonies of conversion, the influence of 17th and 18th century newspapers, almanacs and jest books on the (re-)oralization of stories, ethnic storytelling, until the...

ISEBEL

The acronym stands for Intelligent Search Engine for Belief Legends. The project is an NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) Trans-Atlantic Digging into Data project which involves collaboration with Tim Tangherlini of UCLA and Christoph Schmitt and Holger Meyer of the Wossidlo Institute and the University of Rostock. In the...

Commemorative culture and new public rituals

In the Netherlands as well as elsewhere in the world, an extensive commemorative culture regarding “public death” has come about over the past few decades. This commemorative culture involves violent death in the public domain as a result of traffic casualties, violence or national disasters (MH17), as well as the...

New and contested forms of religiosity

This project incorporates a differentiated field of religious expressions in the past and present. For one part, the research focuses on phenomena such as pilgrimage and appearances and cults around (holy) entities. For another part, the focus is on new, although sometimes implicit, forms of religiosity, spirituality, and ritual practices....

Populism, social media, and religion

The Dutch PVV (Freedom Party) and the German Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident) do not easily fit into conceptual categories such as left/right or religious/secular and publish few programmatic texts. How, then, can we better understand these populist movements? In the project “Populism, social media and...

Intangible heritage and museums

As a result of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, which was ratified by the Netherlands in 2012, various actors such as government institutions, “heritage professionals”, heritage bearers, and museums, interfere in the preservation of everyday culture. They form an (emotional) network that is determined...

The new rural. Material expressions of countryside cultures

The “rural”, a topic currently receiving ample attention, concerns (collective) imagined representations of the countryside and concrete, everyday cultural expressions, as well as the interactions between the two. Drastic changes in the countryside have resulted in new perceptions of everyday rural lifestyles and a wide variety of associated images. The...

Visibility and invisibility: color blindness, race, and the power of images in the Netherlands

Virtual networks and the images that circulate within them are not only part of everyday life, but they also influence to a significant extent the way how people understand themselves in relation to others. In this project, Markus Balkenhol investigates the role of images in constructions of identity in the...

Black Movements: black Dutch in the Atlantic world

As part of the joint research program of the Humanities Cluster entitled “Impact of Circulation”, Markus Balkenhol researches social movements for the civil rights of black Dutch”. Specifically, he researches the influence of international black movements (the Civil Rights Movement, BlackLivesMatter, Rhodes Must Fall) on organizations of Dutch people of...

Maritime and continental orientation

Increased maritime circulation is not only reflected in material and economic history, but also in linguistic history. This linguistic history has been fossilized in similarities and differences in current language varieties: maritime isoglosses. We will research this using Dutch and German varieties. Older and newer connections exist side by side...

Language dynamics in the Dutch Golden Age

Within the language dynamics of the Dutch Golden Age, we observe a type of language variation that has rarely been addressed before: variation within individual language users (intra-author variation). The famous author P.C. Hooft, for instance, uses the Middle Dutch way to express negation as well as a modern alternative....

Gender marking in Dutch dialects

There is a great deal of variation and change in how Dutch and other dialects mark gender. For instance, the Brabant dialects originally have a three-gender system, but the current situation for these dialects demonstrates substantial variation on this point. Language contact in our dynamic and rapidly changing society has...

Dutch beyond the Low Countries

We take initial steps in mapping out Dutch beyond the Low Countries. For this project, a workshop was requested from the Lorentz Center and subsequently granted and contacts will be established with various researchers who want to collaborate on research into the language use of Dutch communities in Australia and...