PhD candidate Robbert Jacobs will be a visiting PhD student at AU in the regi of Uses of the Past, Sustainable Heritage Management and Visual Anthropology March 1st to June 1st 2017.

Robbert Jacobs is a PhD candidate in Film studies and Visual Culture, connected to the Visual & Digital Cultures Research Center at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His work concentrates on contested official representations of Belgian colonialism and artistic/activist reinterpretations of the colonial past in public spaces in Belgium and DR Congo. He works on an action based research agenda that proposes alternatives to existing heritage practices to improve awareness of, and provoke conversations about, colonial heritage and the continuation of colonial structures in the present.

Robbert Jacobs’ stay at AU among other things serves the purpose of strengthening the research initiative that Jan Ifversen, Casper Andersen, Nick Shepherd, Christoffer Kølvraa and Britta Timm Knudsen have undertaken around urban colonial heritage and artistic and citizen-driven reinterpretations that appear these years in Europe as well as in former colonies.

Robbert Jacobs can be contacted at robbert.jacobs@uantwerpen.be.