Leonie Paauwe is a PhD-candidate at the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at the Faculty of Geosciences. She researches the interaction between academia, policymaking and society in the Netherlands between 1945 and 2000 by zooming in on the case study of a geographical subdiscipline then-named Sociale Geografie van Ontwikkelingslanden (Human Geography of Developing Countries). Partly building on its predecessors Colonial Geography and Tropical Geography, this subdiscipline transformed into a prominent academic field in interaction with NGOs and policymakers. By combining oral histories and archival material, this research reconstructs how societal debates on this topic were brought to the university, how academia formulated ideas and contributed to societal debates, and which voices shaped those debates in a (post)colonial context.

Fields of interest:

• History of ideas
• History of Geography
• History of social movements
• History of (International) Development Studies
• De- and Postcolonial theory
• Geopolitics
• Relationships between society and academia