Eldris Con Aguilar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Athena Institute, VU University Amsterdam, within the BEAT (Building Equitable Accessibility Together. Breaking Everyday Barriers to Inclusive City Making) project, where she coordinates and supports the design and delivery of living lab sessions. Her work focuses on participatory research methodologies to foster inclusive co-creation and knowledge exchange. She contributes to building inclusive and reflexive spaces that connect people with physical and cognitive diversities, researchers, municipalities and industry, and supports the BEAT living lab in developing a shared understanding of IUMB's barriers and their impact on everyday life.
Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Athena Institute (2023-2025), where she strengthened collaboration between the Knowledge Alliances Loneliness and Inclusive and Accessible City-Making and local communities through community-service learning, engaging students in real-life societal challenges. During this period, she also worked as a coach for the courses Interdisciplinary Community Service Learning (iCSL 2) and Research Methods for Health Sciences. She also worked at Erasmus University (2021-2023), focusing on evaluating the impact of impact-driven education and exploring methods to assess socially oriented educational practices.
In her doctoral research at Leiden University (2013-2018), she studied how social studies teachers integrate indigenous heritage and archaeological knowledge into their teaching, using a teacher education theory perspective and participatory approaches to broaden understanding of the Caribbean heritage.
Her work focuses on inclusive and open city-making, advancing action research through participatory methods, including co-design, co-creation, and knowledge integration.
