Advancing our understanding of violent interactions is my scientific mission. The scope of my research ranges from interpersonal conflicts between two antagonists to larger scale violent disorder. More specifically, I aim to identify turning points towards the beginning, transformation and endings of violence. I perceive violence as social interactions in which people use their bodies and technology in order to inflict direct physical harm to others.  For those who are regularly confronted with it,  ‘violence’ is mostly about harmful bodily actions that aim to prevent or stop the other from doing what they are doing, intent to be doing or have been doing, when words fail to do so.

I have published on various forms of violence, involving youth, robbers, 'hooligans', police officers and vigilantes, see my scholar Google profile

Theoretically, I follow an interpretative interactionist approach, focusing on the social situations in which violence is generated. In social interactions, people try to make sense to themselves and others what they are doing; hence violence is meaningful to those who use it and are subjected to it. The aim of interpretative interactionism is to understand what people are trying to do when they interact, by interpreting the meanings they give to a specific situation.

Methodologically, I primarily rely on a combination of ethnomethodological video analysis with ethnographic methods. The ubiquity of publicly available video material allows to study real-life interactions in meticulous detail, which I find of great potential for the interpretative interactionist study of violence.

I am currently working on the following projects.

With the support of a research stipend at the Institute d’études avancées de Paris I am working on a book entitled The Social Reality of Violence. The book brings together the main results of my ERC Consolidator Grant research, in which I supervised a team of PhD students conducting ethnographic studies of police teams, football hooligans, groups of delinquent youth, night-time security staff and vigilantes. The main argument of the book is that the reality of violence is social in three ways: 1) violence already becomes a present reality when it is envisioned or anticipated in social interaction (when it is ‘looming’); 2) violence is learned behaviour, and the degree to which violent skills are acquired and in demand differs across societies; 3) social relationships shape the forms and intensity of violence and violence shapes social relationships.

Together with UvA psychologists Disa Sauter and Milica Nikolic, we are leading a UvA Research Priority Area grant to foster interdisciplinary research on emotions, called Real Emotion.

In another project, funded by the Dutch Police & Science Organization, Laura Keesman and I are conducting a study of how European police forces deal with public disorder arising from anti-government protest movements.

In 2024, I acquired an ERC Advanced Grant to study turning-points in episodes of interpersonal conflict between civilians and between police and civilians using video analysis, entitled 'Turn-taking and turning points in violent encounters. Towards an explanatory theory of how conflicts in urban public space begin, transform and end' (Turning Violent).

Beyond these research projects, I am a founding member of the Fenomenalia seminars at the Sociology Department (see below). In 2015, I was elected teacher of the year at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at UvA. I was also a member of the departmental education committee and the committee in charge of redesigning the bachelor program in sociology. I also co-developed a now successful interdisciplinary minor on violence. Finally, I served as co-director of the Cultural Sociology programme group in 2016 and chaired both the national and departmental committees to prepare for the 2020 national research assessment of Dutch sociology. I am also a board member of the Dutch Sociological Association.

With Fenomenalia, we want to build a community of scholars who focus their analyses of social processes on what happens in interactions, using interpretative epistemologies. An overarching question we work on is why people do the things they do when they orient their actions towards others, given historically developed relationships, the future people share, and the wider interdependency networks (figurations) they are tied to.

We are particularly interested in explanations of people’s behaviour that are found after intensive engagement with data that allows us to show how people make sense of their own and others’ actions, and how their sensemaking can be contextualized (i.e. seen as part of a figuration or rooted in particular lifeworlds). These features of interpretative interactionism align with qualitative work in the phenomenological, symbolic interactionist, figurational, ethno-methodological, Goffmanian, pragmatist, social constructivist traditions and recent developments. How do we engage with, integrate and advance these traditions? We are also interested in thinking of how long-term and large-scale social processes (inequalities, in- and exclusions, dominations, emancipations, environmental impacts…, to mention just a few) are actualized and transformed in social interaction.

We welcome colleagues with interests in any sociological topic, data format and methodological orientation so long as they work within, or are interested in, capturing people’s sensemaking in social interaction. In addition to discursive aspects of interactions, we are interested in data and methods that allow researchers to grasp the sensuous and emotional dimensions of social interactions, as well as the temporal and spatial dimensions. In particular, we are open to various phenomenologies, including those of the body as a central locus of intersubjectivity.

Last but not least, we are keen to connect our engagement with social theory to our practical yet critical engagement with policy-makers, governmental institutions and social movements  (welfare state, healthcare, child/youth welfare, policing, medicines regulators, etc).

I teach the following courses:

- Sociological Theory 1: The Making of Society: Social Interactions and Social Reality

- Structural Violence (part of the minor Violence)