About

Klik hier voor de beschrijving in het Nederlands

We – Dide van Eck and Noortje van Amsterdam – are two academics working on diversity issues within organisations. We are engaged in several research projects, some of which we collaborate on. Most importantly, we want to share our research findings with a broad audience. We feel that our research should not only have impact in the academic world, but should also be accessible, understandable and relatable for people who are not in academia. 

On this website we share poems that aim to capture our research findings. We do so to make the results relatable and also to evoke some of the emotional and sensory aspects of our findings (something that is very hard to do in conventional academic prose). The poems are a combination of the words and emotions of the participants from our projects, supplemented by our own reflections and insights from the literature. The poetry is organised thematically around the research projects that we are engaged in (see the Projects page for an overview). We welcome you to:

  • add your experiences and reactions to our poetry through comments. This is how we learn more about the issues we are researching.
  • share any poetry that reflects your experiences with your work, employment or organization. Please send us an email if you have a poem to share. We are more than happy to publish any quality poetry on our website, both in Dutch and in English.

We both have our own research projects. Dide recently finished her PhD at Radboud University in Nijmegen, and is currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher in Work and Organization Studies at the KU Leuven. Her research projects explore the mundane activities in a variety of organizational contexts – aircraft cleaning, airport security, stand-up comedy – that contribute to, or prohibit organizational inclusion to emerge. Dide uses practice theory, ethnography and poetic inquiry to engage with the entangled discursive, material and affective realities of diversity-related phenomena. Noortje is assistant professor in Organization Studies at Utrecht University. She is engaged in several research projects exploring gendered embodiment and health in organizational contexts focusing in particular on experiences that are marginalized or taboo, such as the menopause, motherhood and disabilities. Noortje often uses feminist theory and arts-based methodologies to engage with the viscerality of these experiences. Together we have been engaged in a research project with employees who self-identify as full-figured, obese or fat. You can find more information about our work in the different pages headed under ‘projects’.