Personalia
Margreet Fogteloo, born in Wageningen, the Netherlands, 1962. Masters from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Journalist/editor at Magazine De Groene Amsterdammer.
Journalist-in-Residence (1 September 2015 – 31 January 2016)
Let’s Dance – Nederland in de jaren tachtig, een stille revolutie (The Netherlands in the Eighties, a Silent Revolution)
Research Question
How and where in the eighties has our society started to move into another direction, with a focus on the multicultural society, the meritocracy and the political landscape?
Project Description
The eighties is an underestimated period in our recent history. In general this decade is seen as a dark, pessimistic period of economic hardship and fear for a nuclear war, a time of radical urban activism of squatters and full of anger of ‘the lost generation’. Indeed this is all true. But it also was a period that changed, almost in silence, our society into ‘the open society’ in the global world of today: the internet starts, the multicultural community arises, the meritocracy is developing, the Yuppies and the harsh capitalism and market-liberalism is coming up, the political landscape loses its old ideological shape. In my opinion the eighties are a point of rotation between two optimistic periods of time: the swinging sixties and the roaring nineties. The paradigm switch between these periods took place in the eighties, which makes it a more dynamic and fascinating decade then is usually presumed.
Margreet Fogteloo on her experiences as journalist-in-residence at NIAS (Dutch, pdf)