Born and raised in the Netherlands, I earned my Bachelor of Science in Political Science from Leiden University, where I specialized in International Relations and Organizations with a minor in Chinese Economy and Society. Throughout my undergraduate degree I developed interests across international development, peace and conflict studies, the postcolonial state, contemporary Chinese governance and various strands of critical theory (e.g. queer theory, Marxist literature and anti-/decolonial approaches).
In my undergraduate thesis The Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 and the Politics of Inequality in Uganda: Conditionality, Aid Dependency & Political Scapegoating I applied framing theory and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to the subjects of homosexuality, sexual minority rights and foreign aid in Ugandan parliamentary transcripts. I found that queerness and aid pressures were discursively collapsed into one singular foreign influence corrupting Ugandan society, and as such concluded that the enactment of aid conditionality mechanisms risked further delegitimization of sexual minority rights in Uganda.
One area of history I particularly seek to apply myself to is the study of rich cultural production and complex modes of governance preceding and existing alongside colonial influences in the non-Western world during the early modern and premodern eras. Here I aim to engage in historical scholarship of the Global South which moves beyond a lens that is solely relational to European presence in the region.
During my time in the MA/MSc International and World History degree, I firstly seek to familiarize myself with precolonial and Afro-Indigenous histories, practices, and modes of knowledge production — both to better understand the role these play in challenging continued neocolonial exploitation and impositions of Global North-dominated models of good governance, and to cultivate my own imagination of political and social realities entirely alternative to those dictated by the West.
Secondly, I wish to deepen my knowledge of colonial history and how its legacies shape current systems of inequality, developmental problematics and questions of identity in postcolonial states. Although my scope of research extends to the Global South at large, I will explore these subjects particularly in relation to sub-Saharan Africa and the African diaspora in the Caribbean.
