Worldwide the number of refugees is increasing. Refugee women are at continuous risk for experiencing sexual and gender based violence (SGBV), and SGBV has enormous consequences for their health, integration and participation. Refugee women experience barriers in accessing formal care and simultaneously, their social networks are limited. Peer support groups are an accessible way for support and discussing SGBV. Although community care organizations know how to reach these women, barriers exist for structural implementation of peer support groups. In this project, the accessibility of peer support groups for these women and their implementation in care chains will be explored.

SpringLab VU – het ‘Students as Partners’ (SaP) platform van de Faculteit der Geneeskunde Vrije Universiteit - is sinds haar start gegroeid tot één van de meest aansprekende en vernieuwende onderwijsinitiatieven binnen onze universiteit. In samenwerking met studenten is een plek gecreëerd, waar op basis van de behoeften van studenten, onderwijs in co-creatie wordt verzorgd. De student staat centraal en werkt samen met experts in het verzorgen van onderwijs. De nadruk ligt op het stimuleren van de intrinsieke motivatie van de student. Het gaat om het stimuleren van nieuwsgierigheid van studenten in (en buiten) hun vakgebied, in de breedte en diepte - i.e. verschillende niveaus. Het Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) van de VU faciliteert sterke samenwerkingen tussen SaP-projecten. Hierom heeft het CTL voorgesteld om deze voordracht te doen, met als doel SpringLab VU op te schalen naar andere opleidingen van de VU. De opzet van SpringLab leent zich voor een trans- en interdisciplinaire aanpak, waarbij samen met studenten van andere opleidingen gemeenschappelijke doelen cq. opleidingsvraagstukken geïdentificeerd gaan worden. We beogen de invulling van SpringLab-lessen en activiteiten aan te passen op basis van de behoeften van studenten terwijl de blauwdruk van de organisatiestructuur en kwaliteitswaarborging van SpringLab wordt behouden. Hiermee moedigen we studenten aan om actief deel te nemen aan de ontwikkeling van het nieuwe SpringLab-model. Studenten doen door het kunnen uitdiepen van eigen interesses, al vroeg in hun opleiding, naast onderwijs- en inhoudelijke ervaring, extra ervaring op in persoonlijke ontwikkeling en aansluiting op het toekomstig werkveld en maatschappij.

Psychiatric patients are ambivalent about the value biomarker research. On the one hand, they hope it can give them "definite" proof that their condition is real. On the other hand, they are afraid of stigmatization. Patients stress that biomarker technology should not replace ‘subjective’ experiences in their conversations with psychiatrists. With regard to physicians, in this case urologists, often they disagreed with developers of biomarkers on 1) the perceived advantages of biomarkers; 2) the scientific and clinical evidence; 3) the advantages of other technologies such as MRI in urology; and 4) the value of other diagnostic tests

Many memory institutions across Europe contain holdings connected with its colonial past which for many years has been a focus of contestation from both communities of origin, ethnic minorities and civil society at large. At the same time challenging questions are being asked by professionals in the field as to what to do with this problematic cultural heritage, from returning items when appropriate, to rewriting the historical context surrounding them in a more critical and inclusive way. This project aims to identify key instances of colonial audio-visual heritage across the three archives involved, draw a common map of shared racialised representations connected with their respective imperial contexts, identify problematic visualisation and language and open up a dialogue between the archives and a variety of users, including archivists, researchers, filmmakers, and grassroots organisations. The digitised colonial audio-visual heritage is provided by three national archives: The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the French Institut national de laudiovisuel and Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK. All these archives have a rich collection of original film and sound, some of it produced at the height of empire, ranging from ethnographers footage for educational purposes to more direct propaganda films to bolster colonial ideologies. We will explore how archival material created in a ‘colonial mindset’ can be re-appropriated and re-interpreted critically to become an effective source for the decolonization of the mind and the basis for a future inclusive society. The overall outcome of the project is to engender a polyvocality that can be incorporated into the archive itself providing new ways to enter and explore the past via a contemporary interpretative frame. To this effect advanced technologies will be used to study how to bridge archival and contemporary languages, and to support transnational exploration of multiple archives via a single interactive user interface.

ACKnowledge ("Artists Community Knowledge") investigates art as alternative, embodied and situated knowledge and the ways in which artists create, organize and share this knowledge. We researched three specific artists communal knowledge practices: art libraries and archives; artists self-organizations and their concepts of autonomy; artists material craft practices. Often, these concepts and practices exist as implicit and tacit knowledge within their artists communities. With our project, we wanted to literally acknowledge this knowledge and help making it more explicit and accessible to larger publics.