Louise Wolff

Lecturer, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Sociology

Personal information

I am a PhD candidate and lecturer in the Department of Sociology. With a background as a primary school teacher, and degrees in Child Studies (BA) and Sociology (MA), I bring interdisciplinary and practice‑based expertise to my teaching and collaborations with students. My PhD-research focuses on gender and sexuality minorities who are marginalized within queer communities. Using Community‑Led Research and Action and ethnographic methods, I draw on my insider perspectives and work closely with gender and sexuality minority groups to strengthen inclusion within queer spaces.

I collaborate intensively with students throughout the research project, integrating societal engagement, education, and empirical research into a connected practice.

Research

My PhD research project on gender and sexuality minorities who are marginalized within queer communities builds on earlier work exploring polyamorous experiences in the Netherlands. I explore themes related to gender and sexualities - such as polyamory and broader gender and sexual minority experiences through the lenses of intersectionality and Queer theory.

I collaborate with gender and sexuality minority groups and organisations to co‑create knowledge and develop practices aimed at strengthening inclusion within queer communities. The goal of this project is to conduct research with communities rather than about them, contributing to more inclusive knowledge and community‑driven understandings of queer inclusivity

Teaching

I have been teaching in the Sociology department at the VU since September 2024, at Bachelor and pre‑Master level. I teached courses such as Identity, Diversity and Inclusion, Beyond Gender Inequalities, qualitative methodology courses including Participatory Action Research and Interpretative Research, and projectbased courses that center collaborations with stakeholders. I also supervised a Bachelor Thesis group researching polyamorous experiences in the Netherlands.

Currently, I teach a course on co‑creative methodologies, from which a student-led research group on Solidarity in Queer Communities emerged last year. In this course, we collaborate with several community organizations that are also closely connected to my PhD research practices.

Ancillary activities

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