An Ansoms – Space for Stories | Carrying the pain of others, beyond academic language

In this moving personal memoir, a social scientist who studies resource conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa shares her own story. An Ansoms — professor of social sciences at UCLouvain — writes in Space for Stories. Passion and Vulnerability in Research about the ethical and emotional struggles of her work, about how hearing stories of crisis and conflict triggered her own battle with post-traumatic stress, and about her position and privilege as a white, educated woman working to bridge two continents.

In this sixth episode of Kom Maar Dichter, we move past the back-cover blurb — toward the process, the doubts, and the insights that linger.

An didn't initially intend to write a book. She began writing about her own story at a vulnerable stage of her life, as a way to bring her stories back to herself. Only when friends told her there was more in it than just her own life did the book emerge. It became a kind of "vengeance" of her own way of writing, long locked up in academic language — because in her discipline she had learned that her emotions and her human side were not legitimate.

We talk about the risk of vulnerability (a colleague advised her not to publish before sixty), and how writing was both liberating and exposing. About vulnerability as luxury and privilege, and the responsibility of listening: really listening, giving space to silences, and realising that even a refusal to talk is part of the research. About self-care and secondary trauma — An long saw herself as a kind of "Lara Croft," until her body provided physical proof of what she didn't want to acknowledge.

We also discuss positionality and learning to see privilege, what it means to give a stage that doesn't become violence, and decolonising as daring to touch your own fields of discomfort. About the forest as a mirror and a lesson in modesty, art as a language that expresses what science cannot, and how the writing made An softer — toward herself and her surroundings. Her advice to young researchers: dare to lose time, because true inspiration lies in the unexpected encounter.

Space for Stories by An Ansoms was the starting point for this conversation.

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Come closer. Let's listen carefully.

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In dit ontroerende, persoonlijke relaas deelt een sociaal wetensc