Voor mijn masterscriptie heb ik een kwalitatief onderzoek uitgevoerd naar de verschillende ontologieën (wereldbeelden) die worden ervaren, geuit en uitgewisseld door kleinschalige agro-ecologische boeren in Antioquia, Colombia. Ik heb voornamelijk gekeken naar hoe deze ontologieën verweven zijn met hun relatie tot de natuur en hoe dit in relatie staat tot de landbouwpraktijken in boerengemeenschappen.

For my bachelor thesis I conducted a qualitative research on cultural meanings of coffee ascribed by coffee farmers, coffee tourists and employees of the alternative trade NGO De la Gente. For this research I and two other students conducted eight weeks of fieldwork, three of which in Antigua (Guatemala) and the rest in the Netherlands through online-fieldwork due to the pandemic. In Antigua I worked alongside coffee farmers in their fields, visited their houses and talked with them about their lives, their goals and dreams, the coffee market system and the supply chain. This project not only taught me a lot about coffee as a cultural artifact, supply chains, (dominant) market systems, unequal power relations and negotiations, but also offered me meaningful friendships with farmers.

I worked as a volunteer at VluchtelingenWerk Nederland to accompany a group of undocumented refugees with simple things and keep them company. Undocumented refugees are people who have been (often several times) rejected for a residence permit, but at the same time cannot return to their homeland because that country, for example, no longer permits them. I have organized game nights with them, celebrated holidays, talked and helped with for example buying train tickets or translating Dutch letters. With one of them and in collaboration with a film student, I made a short film about his experiences in the Netherlands as an 'undocumented refugee'.