dr. A.M. Sools (Anneke)

Adapt! societal resilience to crisis

Adapt! Pandemics, terrorism, and climate emergencies endanger not just safety and prosperity but also the core values of open societies – values such as civil liberties, equal opportunity, open enquiry, and solidarity. The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated how quickly even rich and well-organised societies can succumb to a disruptive force coming seemingly out of nowhere. In the Adapt Academy, researchers from Utrecht University, Leiden University external link. Radboud University external link, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam external link and the University of Twente external link are working together to gather more knowledge and expertise on the adaptive capacity of societies in times of crises. Adapting to crisis There is an urgent need for evidence-based insights that help societies to weather a crisis while protecting the core values of the open society. The Adapt! programme will radically advance the current state of the art with regard to knowledge, insights, tools, and strategies that boost the ability of citizens, frontline professionals, and policymakers to collectively weather crises. It will focus on three types of crises: pandemic-related crises, crises resulting from violent extremism, and natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes. Our distinctive contribution is to focus on the societal dimension of crisis response. This has been identified as a critical yet under-researched differentiator and a key area for understanding how communities may strengthen their ability to successfully deal with future crises. Navigating crises The Adapt Academy will become an international centre for the study of societal adaptation in the academic domain, drawing in talent and peer collaborations from around the world through joint studies, fellowships, and conferences. We will build upon our expertise in policy-relevant engagement to tie international, national, and local governments and large non-governmental organisations to the programme.

This is what I could be

Storyworld Possible Selves and Fictionality

How to describe and analyse engagement with narrative? This project combines cognitive narratology, cognitive linguistics and social psychology to understand this process. A ‘storyworld’ is a mental model constructed by the reader, which provides answers to the essential questions for the comprehension of any narrative: who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what manner. ‘Possible selves’ are the selves we would like to become or want to avoid becoming. ‘Storyworld possible selves’ are “imaginings of the self in storyworlds” that may enhance the reader’s involvement and that are activated by a number of linguistic clues. In order to test the viability of this brand new concept, this project brings in recent theories of fictionality, hypothesizing that if a narrative is perceived by the reader as fictional or non-fictional, this will have different consequences for is reception and thus influence the development and relevance of ‘storyworld possible selves’. To test the hypothesis, the project will carry out an empirical investigation in which three groups of participants will be asked to read A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, which was marketed as non-fiction but then ‘became’ fiction after the media exposed its high degree of fabulation. The reader’s engagement with the book will be investigated qualitatively, through questionnaires, in-depth interviews and reading diaries. PhD-student (vacancy) This is a collaboration with Luc Herman (University of Antwerp) and Maria Angeles Martinez Martinez (Complutense University, Madrid).

The Art of Creating New Stories

Working with Art-Based Learning in Palliative Care

Being diagnosed with incurable cancer often leads to experiences of contingency and to existential concerns when patients struggle to search for meaning. The aims of this project are to (1) investigate how Art-Based Learning(ABL) – an art education method for experiencing art – has the potential to affect meaning-making processes of cancer patients in palliative care; (2) to investigate how to integrate this in (patient) education programs; (3) to enable health and art professionals to extent their capabilities to care for PC patients. This project builds on previous research on contingent experiences and narrative meaning-making, and on a pilot-study regarding the feasibility of carrying out ABL in PC. Aims and questions have been developed in a long-lasting process of problem analysis with PC and art education professionals, patients, and researchers. We will a) conduct participatory research to make an inventory of considerations that play a role in designing an art exhibition for the purpose of ABL among patients with advanced cancer, resulting in a manual to be used in future practice and research; b) conduct an explorative study and evaluate which factors hinder and promote patients’ meaning- making processes in online/on-site interventions; c) conduct a formal analysis of patients’ experiences with regards to meaning-making; d) formally compile a full list of conclusion and advices and embed the result in a new educational program for PC and art education professionals. This project is led by the professorship Art education as Critical Tactics(ArtEZ University of the Arts) and is carried out by a consortium of experts and complementary partners: University of Amsterdam and University of Twente (research partners); Amsterdam University Medical Centers, Amsterdam Museum, Museum Arnhem, Museum Jan Cunen, Leren van Kunst (public institutional partners); Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Radboud University, Story Lab-University Twente (knowledge experts); Living with Hope, SPKS, NFK(experience experts/patients advocacy).

Navigating Stories in Times of Transition

The COVID-19 Pandemic as a Use Case

This project aims to develop eScience technologies to advance multidisciplinary approaches of digital storytelling. When societal transitions happen, people respond by telling stories that create continuity and change. In a digital age, storytelling has become even more abundant, rich in variety, and accelerating in pace. The current COVID-19 pandemic allows to study storytelling while transitions are happening. In a multidisciplinary team, we analyze how the varieties of stories evolve over time and across different media. eScience challenges include (1) integrating existing Natural Language Processing tools to extract and preprocess stories from existing and growing collections; (2) further developing Digital Story Grammar methodology to study narrative components in their mutual relations; (3) building a Story Navigator that uses visualization tools, while also allowing for human interpretation; and (4) integrating the tools into the Orange platform to allow re-use by students and researchers. We cooperate with national infrastructures, develop online tutorials, and organize a hands-on workshop to facilitate dissemination and long-term use. Interdisciplinary narrative studies will thus be enriched with necessary tools to analyze storytelling in a digital age as it unfolds in real time across different media and platforms. This can also support sustainable policy making in times of transition.

Will the Future Never be the Same?

Letters from a Post-Corona Future

The current corona virus outbreak has affected our health systems, daily routines, social relationships, livelihoods, the global economic system in ways we never imagined possible. This shows that far-reaching changes, whether negative or positive, are possible. How do we imagine in these circumstances a desirable future after the corona outbreak, rather than the most likely or dreadful future? Our study investigates how a global, disruptive event can impact our perception of what is possible and what is desirable, and the way we make sense of the world (community, society, humanity, the planet) and ourselves.

Narratives of bodily difference research project

The research project Narratives of bodily difference, funded by the Academy of Finland, aims at illuminating the challenges entailed by bodily difference from the perspective of those, who are different. Its starting point is a model of narrative circulation, according to which a person constructs in their mind an "inner narrative" of their life, taking into account the confines of their life situation and deploying model stories available in the cultural stock of stories. Moreover, a person attempts to enact thier inner narratives as "lived narrative" and shares parts of their stories with other people. Bodily difference hampers the narrative circulation in several ways. The constraints inherent in a certain form of difference in a certain social situations restrict the visions of what kind of life is possible, and the cultural stock of stories offers a limited array of story models for those with bodily differences. In addition, the experiences of being different are often difficult to narrate, and the "normal" audience is often reluctant to listen. The project tries to identify the points in which the narrative circulation is hindered or constrained. At the first phase, it uses the life story data collected by Kynnys ry (Being disabled in Finland 2014), as well as philosophical texts on suffering and difference. Later on new data will be collected by interviews, focus group discussions and by narrative futuring workshops. Funding Agency: Akademy of Finland Principle Investigator: Vilma Hänninen Postdoctoral researchers: Elisa Aaltola, Merja Tarvainen, and Hanna Pohjoja.

What Works When for Whom

Mental illnesses, like depression and anxiety, are among the leading causes of the global burden of disease. E-mental health (EMH) interventions, i.e., web-based psychotherapy treatments, are increasingly used to improve access to psychotherapy for a wider audience. Whereas different EMH interventions tend to be equally effective, the responsiveness to a specific treatment shows large individual differences. Therefore, the personalization of treatments is seen as the major road for improvement. Because most EMH interventions use language for communication between counselors and clients, assessing language use provides an important avenue for opening the black box of what happens within therapy. Moreover, EMH makes data of the linguistic interactions between client and counselor available on an unprecedented large scale. The objective of this interdisciplinary proposal is to use e-science methods and tools, in particular natural language processing, visualization and multivariate analysis methods, to analyze patterns in therapy-related textual features in e-mail correspondence between counselor and client. By connecting patterns of known change indicators to therapy outcome, the question What Works When for Whom? can be answered, which will greatly improve the effectiveness of EMH. The core of the project concerns the development of integrated, modular software for the Dutch language, using data from six EMH-interventions with a total of 10.000 e-mails. These data are sufficiently large and varied to allow for computer-based modelling, and testing of use cases with varying complexity. At the end of the project, the step toward English language software will be made to increase the impact of the project. Funding Agency: NWO/eScience Principle Investigator: Anneke Sools PhD-candidate: Wouter Smink Postdoc Researcher: Erik Tjong Kim Sang Project duration: 2016-2020

Wonderful life: a novel, appreciative intervention to elicit meaning in life

Experiencing meaning in life is crucial to well-being. In this study, we focus on those extraordinary moments in life when meaning manifests itself spontaneously: when we suddenly feel a powerful, affirmative connection to existence. Narratives of these wonderful moments in life are collected by using a question derived from the Japanese movie ‘After Life’: ‘What if there is an afterlife. There, all your memories will be erased, except for one. Which memory do you choose to take with you to eternity?’. Insights from these narratives are used to develop an intervention that helps to establish our connection to meaning in daily life. PhD-student: Jacky van de Goor