1st April is beginning to feel like one of my favourite dates. Some pretty significant milestones of my professional life has been marked by this 1st April date – and it’s no joke 😉 This is especially in relation to my academic career trajectory in the Netherlands. Prior to my transition from being a professional student to being an academic, the month of September was one of my favourite months as it heralded the start of the academic year. As a student moving from city to city, I always have fond memories of the excitement and anticipation of September coming around again – excitement of starting yet again another degree programme, being in a new university city, making new friends, and the anticipation of learning something new. Has September lost a bit of it’s shine on this side of the fence? Yeah, a bit of the shine has worn off since my student days. I still retain some fondness for September even as I see the fresh faces of students into my class. Yet, nowadays September tend to be associated with feelings such as: ‘oh no, my summer is over’; ‘did I manage to update my lecture notes?’; ‘will there be too many or too few students on my course’; ‘how would the students respond to the course content?’; ‘will the study trip happen as I planned?’; and  other such exciting teaching related worry admin.

So, back to 1^st April! They say life is lived forward but understood backward. This appears to be the case for me. It was not intentional nor premeditated. It is only now that I’m looking back that it begins to make sense to me. There was first 1^st April 2019 when my academic journey at Wageningen University & Research began as Lecturer in Cultural Geography after relocating from the Steel City. Then came the second instance of 1st April 2021 when my NWO Veni research project officially began on the tourism geographies of slavery heritage in the Ghana-Suriname-Netherlands triangle. ….and now comes another significant 1st April milestone. Perhaps it’s time I become more intentional in scheduling such career trajectory points on 1st April.

Today 1st April 2025 marks the official start of my ERC Starting Grant project: FRICTIONS (Frictions of space: the generative tensions of slavery and colonial heritage tourism) which is set to run for the next five years. The team to help execute the project is coming into place even as we’ve now recruited the three PhD students who will join us from September. The aim of FRICTIONS is to unravel the extent to which tourism transforms the past of slavery and colonial heritage and the frictions generated. It also looks at how these frictions are scaled up to provoke shifts in societal narratives about dealing with this shared past in the present. I will build a research team of the 3 PhD Candidates and a Postdoc, (and what I hope to be a host of collaborators in many different places) and together we will address the main research aim through 5 Work Packages that are aligned with 5 main research questions and 5 main corresponding research objectves. FRICTIONS is founded on insights from my 4 year NWO funded Veni project that officially ended in December 2024 and was marked a commemorative celebration .

Here is a glimpse of some of the key details of FRICTIONS and what is in store for the next 60 months:

I am excited about FRICTIONS! I am so grateful to God for the opportunity to lead this project. I look forward with great anticipation to its unfolding through the valleys and mountains that a project of this magnitude is bound to travel through. To start off, I will be re-reading all the drafts of the proposal as I developed it, the feedback comments in track changes from the wonderful colleagues who supported me through the process, official letters and emails from the ERC that I received throughout the process of grant application: interview invitation, reviewer reports, the evaluation report, the award letter, the grant agreement document etc. It’s a bit of a going back into the frame of mind in which the proposal emerged and took shape. For now and from today, I can go begin to think through how to bring all the research dreams to life. Reach out to me if any of the themes of the project strikes a cord for you and you see opportunities for research collaboration. Watch this space….