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TCULT was an interdisciplinary research project focusing on the dynamics of language and culture in the multicultural neighbourhoods of Lombok and Transvaal in Utrecht. The Meertens Institute in Amsterdam conducted research into bilingualism in the Lombok neighbourhood of Utrecht, collecting 150 recordings of interviews, speeches and songs, mainly from Turkish and Moroccan residents of Lombok. The project investigated the cultural and linguistic repertoires of both individual residents and diverse communities, including native Dutch people, Moroccans, Turks, Surinamese and other ethnic groups.
In addition to the internal structure of...

Het “Vrouw en Kerk” oral history project, gemaakt door Josien Pieterse als interviewer en geproduceerd door Aletta – Instituut voor Vrouwengeschiedenis, documenteert de persoonlijke verhalen van vrouwen die een belangrijke rol hebben gespeeld binnen de kerk. Het project ligt onder de hoede van Atria, kennisinstituut voor emancipatie en vrouwengeschiedenis. Het richt zich op de ervaringen, geloofsbeleving en feministische betrokkenheid van deze vrouwen.

Het project bevat twee interviews. Dit project werd gepresenteerd in de tentoonstelling Vrouwen voor het Voetlicht (Museum Catharijneconvent, 2012)

In het eerste interview wordt een vrouw geportretteerd die...

Freddie was part of an armed resistance group together with her sister Truus and Hannie Schaft. Freddie carried out dangerous resistance work, including several assassinations, while she was still a young girl. In the interview, Freddie candidly discusses her role as a young teenager in a resistance group and the mutual trust, romantic feelings, and position vis-à-vis the outside world.
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Adriaan was a boy from Rotterdam who fell in love with his Jewish neighbor. One day, to his dismay, she was gone. Later, he became involved in the...

Stalin’s Great Terror

At the time, between twelve and twenty million Russians disappeared as “enemies” of the regime in the gulag camps or were sentenced to death. Adler explains that, in the eyes of the Russian government, the research institute has gone too far in its investigation.

“The Memorial staff didn’t just want to investigate victims. They also wanted to publish information about the perpetrators. They wanted to say who had done it, who was guilty. And that is the system itself. That is a history that Putin is not...

Midwives Franka Cadée, Erna Kerkhof, and Djanifa de Conceicao, maternity nurses Thea Groeneveld and Pien Jasper, and gynecologist Martine Hollander share their knowledge about the unique birth care in the Netherlands from their personal experience and perspective. Together, they paint a powerful yet vulnerable picture of a birthing culture that is under considerable pressure from a zeitgeist of medicalization, market forces, and modern society’s urge for control. This puts pregnant women’s freedom to choose to give birth safely at home at risk.

The value and uniqueness of our birth...

This was a profound event that many people still carry with them today.

The exhibition sketches an idea of the disbelief, shock, and grief that many residents of the Bijlmer experienced. This is done using newspaper headlines from October 5—‘Fire, death, chaos’ and ‘Suddenly he turned on his side and fell straight down’—and conversations transcribed on canvas that were held by 112 emergency service workers that evening. Drawings by primary school pupils from that time are also on display. The drawings provide insight into how children experienced this event....

Mieke, Jan, Jolanda, Frank, Karin, and Joost were young and needed a place to live. One squatted a building for herself and her son, another squatted for others who didn’t dare, or organized housing actions. But squatting was not just a reaction to boarded-up houses and a severe housing shortage. Squatting in the Indische Buurt was a social struggle, conducted nonviolently and in cooperation with the neighborhood.
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These were socially conscious young people who not only resisted, but also committed themselves to the neighborhood. Jolanda and Karin set...

During the war years, the transports, known colloquially as the “Jews’ trains,” traveled from Hooghalen via Winschoten, Nieuweschans, and Leer further east. Their final destination was usually the former General Government for the occupied territories in Poland.

Dutch and German people who lived or worked near the Hooghalen–Leer railway line, mostly as young adults, witnessed these transports. Sometimes they could see people sitting in the trains, and often they saw notes thrown out of the trains as a last sign of life. They picked up these notes and tried...

Many women’s collectives originated in women’s shelters. Almost every major city in the Netherlands had one in the 1970s. Various collectives emerged from these shelters, each with its own goal or theme.
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Information was disseminated via women’s newspapers, “hand-stenciled for 35 cents.” The Amsterdam Women’s House was home to the publishing house De Bonte Was. It published ‘En ze leefden nog lang en gelukkig’ (And they lived happily ever after), which appeared in 1974 and is about marriage and ‘the expectations before and the disappointments after’.
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Angry at...

At the beginning of the Second World War, the evacuation of children was organized by primary schools with the help of school doctors. From January 1945, during the Hunger Winter, around 600 children were sent away by the Inter Kerkelijk Bureau (Inter Denominational Bureau); the children were taken to families in provinces where they could leave the war behind them for a while. In the winter of 1944-1945, some parents also took the initiative to send their children away.
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This project focused on the role of religion in...

Flevoland is the result of the largest land reclamation project ever undertaken: the Zuiderzee Project. In the last century, thousands of men moved to the reclaimed seabed to work on making the new polders habitable. This raises interesting questions, such as: What did the landscape look like? When did animals and plants arrive on this new land? And what was it like to farm on this former seabed? In 2013, Landschapsbeheer (Landscape Management) set up an Oral History project in collaboration with the Nieuw Land Erfgoedcentrum (New Land...

In 2018, Landschapsbeheer Flevoland launched the Oral History Zeewolde project. In collaboration with volunteers and the municipality of Zeewolde, the story of Zeewolde was recorded through a total of 30 interviews. During these interviews with, for example, Zeewolde’s first general practitioner, its first residents, and gamekeepers, questions were explored such as: What did the reclaimed seabed look like? What was the first thing to grow there? When and how did animals arrive on the new land? What was it like to be among the first people to live...