Roundtable discussion

Reading Den Haag: Mobility, Memory, Landscape, and Livelihood in the Everyday Urban

Date: Tuesday 27 October 2026
Time: 17:15 - 20:00
Location: Anna van Buerenplein
Anna van Buerenplein 301
2595 DG The Hague
Room: 2.21 | Auditorium

To celebrate 10 years of the Humanities Across Borders programme, we invite you to a roundtable discussion jointly organised by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and Leiden University College (LUC). We will explore how Den Haag and its resident communities can become deeply legible for students, educators, the municipality, policymakers, and residents themselves. This event will also mark the release of the second edition of "Asian Diaspora in The Hague: A Multilingual Wordbook", published by IIAS in collaboration with the Gemeente Den Haag.

A drinks reception will follow this event and requires registration to attend.

Registration

Roundtable Participants

1. Achim Häger (Assistant Professor, Leiden University College, Den Haag)

Achim Häger is Assistant Professor at Leiden University College. His research focuses on the links between biological diversity and ecosystem services, as well as the sustainable management of protected areas in Central America and the Netherlands. He has worked predominantly with institutions of higher education that implement an active learning approach through field research projects, skill-oriented labs, and the promotion of critical thinking.

Currently, together with his students and colleague Paul Hudson, Achim conducts research in the dunes of The Hague in collaboration with Dunea, the water company. His work has contributed to finding applicable strategies for land-based climate change mitigation and adaptation in collaboration with students, rural communities, and local governments.

2. Josien de Klerk (Leiden University College, Den Haag)

Josien de Klerk is a medical anthropologist and Associate Professor at Leiden University College. She has extensive research experience in Eastern Africa on topics of aging, community-based care, HIV/AIDS and loss, stress and wellbeing and the politics and practices of public health interventions. Her current collaborative research focuses on narratives of good parenting and the invisible care work of community counselors in a parenting intervention for mothers and infants in Johannesburg, South Africa.

At LUC she holds the portfolio for societal engagement and is involved in making visible LUC’s unique approaches to engaged teaching and research in the city of the Hague. Josien is a member of the Knowledge Platform Senior Friendly City and collaborates with local partners in her teaching.

3. Maja Vodopivec (Leiden University College, Den Haag)

Maja Vodopivec is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University College and teaches Peace and Conflict Studies Global History of Asia. Her research interest lies in postwar Japanese intellectual history, peace and conflict studies, and knowledge production.

As part of her work at LUC, Maja has taught and coordinated the “Decolonizing Our Plates: Global History of Food” clinic course and “Sustainability, Climate Change, and Food” minor. Inspired by the Humanities Across Borders methodology and placing food at the center of investigation, these courses engaged with the immediate environment of The Hague and explored current-day debates on political, environmental, economic and cultural change at both the local and global levels. Maja is co-founder of the Fireside Peace Chats initiative, a space where practice, research, and policy in the field of peacebuilding come together in an informal way through the experiences of people on the ground. By sharing personal stories from peacebuilders and other figures with extensive experience in conflict areas, the initiative wants to contribute to a locally informed paradigm shift in liberal peacebuilding.

4. Roy Huijsmans (ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Roy Huijsmans is an Associate Professor in Childhood and Youth Studies and Vice-dean of education at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

His research is concerned with how children and young people are affected by and contribute to societal development and change. For this he has studied young people’s role in migration, their engagement with schooling and (un)paid work, the role of mobile technologies in young people’s lives, popular culture and dance, young adults’ involvement in the gig economy, and young people’s engagement with the future through the concept of aspiration. In his research, he privileges the perspectives and experiences of children and youth and on this basis speak back to dominant ideas underpinning policy and practice. Much of his research takes an ethnographic approach and is mostly conducted in Southeast Asia (especially Laos) and Europe (especially the Netherlands).

5. Jordy Simonis (Inclusief Samenleven, Municipality of Den Haag)

Jordy Simonis (he/him) works as a junior policy officer Inclusive Society (Inclusief Samenleven) at the municipality of Den Haag. The team he works for makes policies on anti-discrimination, anti-racism, women and queer emancipation and awareness around the colonial past. These policies are all part of one intersectional policy document “Allemaal anders, iedereen Haags” (Everybody is different, but we are all from Den Haag). His field of work consists of subsidization, labour market discrimination, and anti-racism (anti-Black racism and anti-Asian racism). The municipality of Den Haag is the first municipality in The Netherlands that has a municipal plan on combatting anti-Black racism. He is part of the project team that is responsible for the execution of the plan.

Moderators

1. Aarti Kawlra (IIAS, Leiden University)

Aarti Kawlra is a social anthropologist and Academic Director of the education collaboration programme and network, Humanities Across Borders (HAB) of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) since 2016. She is interested in using inter-disciplinary methods to interrogate colonial, postcolonial and global discourses of heritage, development, technology, and education. Her experience in working with local, national, and international craft advocacy groups and institutions has helped shape the place- and practice-based pedagogical experiments of IIAS (with partners in Asia, Africa and Latin America), to facilitate trans-regional curricular interventions in the Humanities.

She is the founding editor of the Humanities Across Borders Methodologies open-access book series, jointly supported by the Mellon Foundation and the IIAS, and published by Leiden University Press. The inaugural volume titled Words in Use, co-edited with Mohomodou Houssouba, is forthcoming.

2. Jyothi Thrivikraman (Leiden University College, Den Haag)

Jyothi Thrivikraman is an Assistant Professor of Global Public Health at Leiden University College. She completed her PhD in Social Policy at the Heller School of Social Policy and Management (Brandeis University) in Waltham, Massachusetts (USA).

The core of her research at LUC has focused on food waste and food insecurity. She was part of a knowledge partnership with colleagues at LUC on food waste as an expression of identities, prosperity, social and ecological rights, and responsibilities, supported by the Central Innovation District in The Hague municipality. Many of her current projects sit at this intersection of participatory action research and food insecurity/waste.

As an HAB partner, Jyothi has collaborated with fellow partners Tharaphi Than, Surajit Sarkar and Yi Li to conduct pedagogical and storytelling workshops for underground educators in Myanmar, which led to the creation of the “Our Stories Matter!” educational training guide. She has also set up a virtual collaboration between LUC and Virtual Federal University (VFU) looking at the social determinants of health for students in Myanmar and Gaza.