Studying Experiences, Imaginaries and Legacies of Conflict, War and Violence across the Social Sciences and the Humanities
Thursday 5 February 2026, 09:30-17:00 at the Vondelzaal, UB (University of Amsterdam)*
This interdisciplinary workshop brings together scholars at all career stages (including PhD researchers) from both the Social Sciences and the Humanities who study conflict, war, and violence at the UvA. Despite clear societal relevance, shared research interests, and overlapping research experiences, disciplinary and institutional boundaries continue to hinder interdisciplinary understanding and cooperation. This is especially visible in the practicalities of conducting research on these topics.
In this workshop, we aim to explore points of connection as well as tensions by focusing on four interrelated themes. These will serve as the basis for roundtable discussions that elicit and address struggles around:
- Methods: What epistemologies guide our work? Which methods do we employ to study conflict, war, and violence? What counts as data, and how do we analyze it? How do these choices shape our work both in and beyond the field?
- Ethics: Which ethical dilemmas arise when studying conflict, war, and violence? What responsibilities do we have toward our research participants and toward archival material? How do we navigate the “politics of ethics”? And how do we reconcile our ethical research practice with requirements imposed by ethics committees?
- Care practices: How do we deal with the emotional and mental toll of researching conflict, war, and violence, whether through engagement with visual or textual material or through interaction with survivors? What forms of support do we need, and which do we actually receive? How, if at all, do our institutions acknowledge this emotional burden?
- Engagement and activism: Can and should we use our work to contribute to political or societal change, and if so, how? With whom do we collaborate? What is the societal relevance of our research, and how do politics or society respond to the critiques we may put forward, for example in the context of militarization or rising authoritarianism in Europe? How do we deal with situations in which our work becomes politicized or marginalized?
Across four collaborative roundtable sessions, we invite scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to speak briefly on one of these themes from their own experiences, followed by interdisciplinary discussion and debate. The main aim is to build mutual understanding of each other’s research practices, foster collaboration, inspire new ideas, and lay groundwork for future cross-disciplinary and cross-faculty initiatives.
Please submit your expression of interest in presenting by by the extended deadline of Wednesday 7 January using the link below. We will follow up and compose the program by mid-January. We very much look forward to hearing from you.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to Julienne at j.h.j.weegels@uva.nl
Sign up here
This workshop is organized by Samuël Kruizinga, Hanna Mühlenhoff, and Julienne Weegels with the support of the ARTES research cluster Social Justice & Contestation, the research group Conflict, War & Violence, the Amsterdam Centre for Conflict Studies (ACCS), and the Conflict & Society RPA.
