After receiving my bachelor degree in sociology at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam I switched sides and decided to get my master degree in Cultural Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Here I graduated on how robbers use their bodily postures and weapons to attain emotional dominance in robberies. Together with my supervisors we published this work in a special issue of the Journal of Research of Crime and Delinquency. The new situational approach of violence caught my interest, because now, unexpectedly, my personal fascination with fighting and my academic career in sociology came together.
While writing my master thesis, I became a research-assistant at the Netherlands Institute for the Research of Crime and Delinquency (NSCR) and later as an assistant in the Group Violence Research Programme, collecting and coding video footage and developing codebooks for the analysis of violent situations (see the video analysis project). Before my current position as a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) and the department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, I taught freshman courses and qualitative methods at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Being part of the GroupViolence team enables me to further contribute to the sociology of violence and qualitative methodologies. Finally, through my research on violence in groups of youth, I also aim to contribute to society, by generating knowledge that may help to de-escalate violent situations and/or to reduce their harmful consequences.