Nanke Verloo held the second Urban Citizen Fellowship, carrying out research on dissent, disagreement and protest. “My project developed better than I could have hoped.”
“Through the Urban Citizen Fellowship, I found an extremely interesting case study in which all my interests and conceptual ideas can be analyzed empirically, received all the necessary connections to stakeholders involved in the case study, had the time to interview all these stakeholders and do document analyses as well as observations of internal meetings and council meetings and received valuable feedback on my findings from the generous colleagues at NIAS.
Even the corona virus had a silver lining in my case because I was able to do the majority of my interviews digitally and record them on Zoom and I was allowed in internal sessions that took place online, that may have been more difficult to attend in the office of the district council. This will all be worked into the essay that I am writing about re-politicizing citizen participation in Amsterdam.”
Nanke Verloo was the Urban Citizen Fellow in 2020/21, a fellowship set up with the Municipality of Amsterdam. She worked on a research project to stimulate democratization practices in Amsterdam that are more inclusive to contentious politics and diverse voices of citizens. Verloo is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam.