University of Humanistic Studies

Although there is not much attention for the concept of social suffering in studies on welfare policy and frontline work, it offers a valuable perspective for understanding both the harms that welfare clients endure and the ways in which state actors may either mitigate or compound this harm. Based on observations of 172 welfare encounters in the Netherlands, we contribute to the literature by empirically showing how welfare officials respond to the social suffering of clients. Officials most often misrecognized the social suffering of welfare clients by ignoring, reacting indifferently or individualizing it. Moments when they recognized it were more exceptional and took the form of empathising with the feelings of clients or acknowledging the social origin of their suffering. In the context of widespread distrust in institutions following governmental crises such as the Dutch Benefit Scandal, we believe it is important to invest more efforts in examining how and why frontline workers use their discretion to respond to people's social suffering.

This article presents a parallel analysis of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and contemporary literature on moral injury to explore how Dante’s journey towards enlightenment can inform the path to healing from moral injury. Described as a soul wound by those affected, moral injury is a severe psychological and spiritual trauma resulting from ethical transgressions such as abuse, betrayal, war and tyranny. Although moral injury is arguably as old as human conflict itself, its scientific study is comparatively new. The Divine Comedy is widely regarded as one of the greatest works in world literature. In this poem, moral suffering appears as a disordering of the soul: the will estranged from responsibility, love misdirected towards evil rather than good and the intellect dimmed of its light, unable to perceive truth. By comparing Dante’s allegorical journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise with contemporary moral injury discussions and the broader literature, and by tracing connections from individual suffering to wider social and political contexts, this comprehensive narrative review uncovers underexplored dimensions of this multifaceted condition. The analysis addresses key moral injury themes, highlights routes and barriers to healing, identifies gaps in current scholarship and offers practical recommendations relevant in both peacetime and war. Dante’s insights provide a symbolic framework for recognising and healing moral injury, potentially offering consolation for the affected and those who care for them, while showing how enduring cycles of violence can be interrupted through an ethic of just peace.

This essay weaves together artistic and scholarly modes of inquiry to propose a queer ethics of care, love, and attunement across species boundaries. It is grounded in a collaborative artistic research project that explores diverse perspectives on human-cow relations, beginning from the premise that queer, nonbinary, and trans* perspectives can offer distinct and generative strategies for confronting and disrupting the gendered structures of oppression in industrial animal production. Combining photography, film, theory, and performative writing, this essay documents a live encounter between Piet — an intersex bovine living in a meadow in the south of the Netherlands — and Soya the Cow, the vegan queer-feminist drag persona of Swiss performance artist Daniel Hellmann. Staged by the authors as a one-day interspecies performance in the spring of 2024, and filmed by the Utrecht-based transgender advocacy and filmmaking collective De Transketeers, this encounter offers a speculative exploration of what this essay calls a trans*species ethics of care—one that attends to embodied experiences and modes of being that resist conventional classifications of gender and sexual variance, not only among humans but across species differences. It models more responsive and egalitarian ways of relating to the more-than-human beings with whom we share a multispecies world, while foregrounding how gender and animality are co-constituted within, and against, anthropocentric norms.

Many existing questionnaires fail to capture non-religious aspects of spirituality. This review investigates whether existing questionnaires assess secular expressions of spirituality relevant to resilience and coping. A literature search (March 1, 2024) in Web of Science, APA PsycInfo, Embase, and Medline identified 6,577 articles. Twenty-nine questionnaires were screened and qualitatively analyzed, focusing on connection, spiritual coping, and transcendence. Three instruments, the Spiritual Attitude and Involvement List (SAIL), the Spirituality Scale, and the Spiritual Orientation Inventory (SOI), almost adequately addressed non-religious transcendence. Items (twelve on transcendence, four on coping) conceptualized transcendence abstractly, emphasizing receptivity and trust in coping. Few questionnaires deeply assess secular spirituality, but several suitable items were found, enabling development of a survey applicable to both religious and non-religious individuals.