I was educated in the Liberal Arts and received my PhD from Brown University in Anthropology and Development. I teach at Leiden University College, a Liberal Arts and Science Honors College in the Netherlands. For the past 20 years I have continued my work on human rights, sustainable livelihoods and social justice. I have a passion for understanding learning and exploring how to foster empathic education. I work to bring together the realms of culture, learning, and play.
Connections is a trivia and task-based game designed by students to explore how people relate to their surroundings. Each game features students’ self-created “connection spaces” within their learning communities. Solo players learn about these spaces through questions and action prompts—deepening their awareness of place and inspiring new ways to engage with the environments where they live and learn.
Consent Carousel is a role-play game that trains students to navigate real-world challenges in obtaining informed consent. Players take on personas like The Introvert or The Paranoid, practicing empathy, communication, and ethical judgment. Through feedback and reflection after each round, students learn when to persist, adapt, or stop—essential preparation for ethical, cross-cultural fieldwork.
The Good Life Game invites players into people’s visions of sustainable livelihoods—balancing what sustains life with what threatens it. Created by students through photovoice and storytelling, the game turns real experiences into play. Players roll dice to defend spaces of everyday life, learning how communities protect what they value against the risks that endanger it. Game-building instructions are available for teachers who want to use this method with their students.
Syllabust is an open-source tool that gamifies the process of designing a course syllabus. Teachers and students collaborate and compete to create the most compelling course designs under specific constraints: learning objectives, structure, rhythm and flow, available resources, teacher favourites, and context. Students serve as judges: will it become the winning syllabus—or just a syllabust? This game-based design tool brings creativity to course planning, renews enthusiasm for existing teaching materials, and fosters genuine co-creation between teachers and students.
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Syllabust Website (Coming soon)
Angela Ignatius is a choose-your-own-adventure game where students negotiate how—and how much—AI belongs in university life. Across four chapters—assignments, readings, group work, and research—teams debate choices and face consequences. The game ends with a “Friendship Agreement with AI,” translating reflection into shared, actionable norms for ethical AI use. It is freely available in analog and digital formats.
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Ethics of Engagement is a competitive, scenario-based game that helps teams explore what it means to engage ethically. Players draft agreements, challenge each other with worst-case scenarios, and defend their choices—revealing gaps, assumptions, and shared values. It’s a powerful, playful way to build trust and anticipate challenges in any new collaboration or partnership.
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Game of Games (GoG) is an open-source tool (available in analog or digital versions) that gamifies the process of game design. It teaches anyone to design games—individually or in groups—for any purpose. GoG is also a powerful learning method: students can design games to process readings or use it in the field as a research tool. It brings learning to life through play, creativity, and collaboration.
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I design field schools that immerse students in community life and emphasize reciprocity. From East Africa to the Dutch island of Terschelling, these programs foster learning through homestays, collaboration, and shared experience. Current efforts focus on creating joint field schools where Kenyan and international students learn together as equal partners in cross-cultural, community-based education.
Drawing on anthropological fieldwork training, I developed an open-access Field Journaling Method to help students turn reflection into a research tool. Designed for any discipline, it supports six key functions—planning, emotional regulation, positionality, visioning, fieldnotes, and goal setting—encouraging mindful, ethical, and self-aware engagement with the field as a space of learning and discovery.
In a time when internationalization is under debate in the Netherlands, my work explores the power and challenges of the international classroom. I study how students’ diverse backgrounds enrich learning and how they experience this diversity, while experimenting with pedagogical methods that foster deeper understanding, dialogue, and connection across cultural and intellectual difference.
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This project explores how educators teach complex, “wicked” problems across cultures and contexts. Through a systematic review and workshops with partners around the globe, we exchange methods and approaches to improve the (ethical) teaching of wicked problems-examining how lived experience, institutional structures, and culture shape learning about global challenges.
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This experiential course turns students into development practitioners—working in teams to design solutions for real-world challenges from partner organizations. Alongside project work, students build key skills in teamwork, reflection, and design thinking while critically exploring how “doing development” happens in practice. The course and its custom video materials are shared open-source for others to teach and adapt.
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This course uses an empathic, de-othering approach to explore life in Africa through a gendered life-course lens. Each week focuses on a different stage—students first reflect on their own experiences before engaging with African ethnographies. This method cultivates empathy and self-awareness and is shared open-source for teaching about Africa or other world regions.
ArtWorks4Sustainability explores how art and artistic methods can deepen understanding and advocacy for sustainable living. Rooted in my teaching at Leiden University College, it uses creative expression to highlight how knowledge is co-created through emotion, reflection, and connection—inviting students and educators alike to use the arts to imagine and work toward sustainable futures.
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Struggle in the City (SitC) invites students to explore how people experience and respond to urban struggles—such as homelessness, street insecurity, or loneliness-and to ask how we can better understand others’ lives. Centered on recognition, empathy, and outreach, students engage in empathic learning and design serious games that illuminate struggle and the many ways people formally and informally provide support. Originating in The Hague, I offer open resources for educators and communities to adapt in cities worldwide.
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As Global Citizenship Coordinator at Leiden University College, I lead efforts to embed ethical, reflective, and action-oriented learning across the curriculum. Through the new Global Citizenship Portfolio, students connect values to action, develop civic and collaborative skills, and grow as citizen scholars—drawing on innovations like Learning Mindset and Game-Design Based Learning to shape their journey.
I pioneer Game-Design Based Learning (GDBL)-an approach where students learn by creating games about complex issues. As learners become designers, this method fosters creativity, collaboration, empathy and critical thinking. I study how GDBL works across different learning environments, cultures, and age groups-exploring its potential as an inclusive, playful pedagogy that makes learning active and transformative.
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The Learning Mindset (LM) project is an award winning (Hoogonderwijspremie 2022) educational innovation I co-founded with David Ehrhardt to help students become more autonomous, intentional learners. LM tools prompt students to reflect on their own goals within their learning environments, design strategies to achieve them, practice deliberately, and take feedback seriously. We co-create these tools with educators and students from all over the world and we research their impact on learning and well-being. Our LM tools are free to use and customize and licenced under Creative Commons.
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In Maasailand, the shift from communal to privatized land has transformed livelihoods and social relations. This research examines how property rights are negotiated among people with overlapping claims, how new enclosures emerge, and how privatization produces inequality—revealing that ownership is never just about land, but about power, belonging, and the politics of access.
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My research explores how mobility reshapes families, gender, and childhood. From Maasai migrants sustaining rural projects to women navigating spousal separation and children moving between homes and cities, I study how migration redefines care, kinship, and opportunity. This work reveals migration as not just movement—but a reimagining of family, responsibility, and hope for the future.
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This project rethinks research as a collective rather than individual pursuit. Too often, studies repeat rather than build on past work—wasting effort and eroding community trust. In many places, people are fatigued by endless research with little return. I explore how collaboration, data sharing, and projects like Nairobi’s research repository can reduce redundancy and renew trust to build knowledge together.
This Erasmus+ ICM mobilities project explores what it means to be a good partner in higher education. In collaboration with Maasai Mara University, the University of Nairobi, and Kenyatta University, we work to build more reciprocal and equitable relationships between African and European institutions—through exchanges, workshops, and creative reflection on fairness and shared learning in academia.
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Committeefication captures how committees have become the main vehicle through which development and governance unfold in Africa (and elsewhere). My research investigates how committees organize participation, distribute authority, and mediate power—asking why they are so widespread, how they shape collective action, and what they enable or constrain in the pursuit of equitable, effective local governance.
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In Maasailand, Kenya, my research explores how Maasai communities navigate changing ecologies and economies. Drawing on political ecology and ethnoecology, I examine how land reforms, privatization, and global pressures reshape access to rangelands—and how women, men, and youth creatively adapt. This work reveals the politics of land, livelihoods, and belonging in a transforming landscape.
I study how human rights are lived, contested, and reinterpreted in real-world contexts. My work explores how global rights ideas shape local struggles—and how communities adapt or resist them. Focusing on rights around schooling, child labor, marriage, and land, I reveal rights as dynamic social practices rather than fixed universal ideals.
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Starting in May 2025, this large 7-year NWO funded research consortium tackles biodiversity loss by mobilizing collective action across Dutch meadows, the Argentine Pampas, and East African savannas. Working hands-on with partners, CurveBend co-creates landscape-level solutions for a nature-positive future. I co-lead the East Africa work package and supervise 2 PhDs and a Post-doc.
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