2024 Hermesdorf Awards to Niels Spierings and Constant Swinkels

Winner of the 2024 Hermesdorf Award: Niels Spierings

As a sociologist within Radboud University, Niels Spierings investigates issues of inclusion and exclusion, and in that capacity, he has in recent years championed several target groups that regularly come under fire. Spierings focuses specifically on the role of Islam in politics and the emancipation of women and LGBTQ+ people, and was also involved in the National Voters Survey in 2021 and 2023.

With his research, Spierings aims to take the sting out of the debate so that simple assumptions around gender, politics and Islam can be broken with more nuance, understanding and accurate knowledge. In 2021, for example, research by Spierings and Saskia Glas showed that adherence to the Islamic faith does not necessarily lead to homophobic intolerance, and that religion can sometimes actually be used to promote progressive thinking.

Within the University, Spierings is an interdisciplinary jack-of-all-trades. For example, he was involved in the National Voters Survey 2023 with several political scientists, including Kristof Jacobs and Remko Voogd of Radboud University. Their team provided extensive media context for the election results over the past year. Spierings himself was asked by several newspapers to interpret the voting behaviour of Dutch people with a non-Western migrant background or the rise of PVV and NSC, based on this extensive survey of over 5,000 voters.

Spierings does not shy away from the fierce reactions evoked by these kinds of topics; indeed, he continues to seek the debate. On NPO's Argos Medialogica programme, he commented on the anti-gender rhetoric of conservative parties, in De Correspondent and Trouw, he spoke about acceptance of LBGTQ+, in NRC about the PVV-voting Muslims or the lack thereof, on NU.nl about job market discrimination against Muslim women (following a report he and his colleagues had written for the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment) and in Elsevier about conservative young men. Spierings himself writes on StukRoodVlees and Sociale Vraagstukken, and he also does not shy away from discussions on social media such as X and LinkedIn.

Winner of the 2024 Hermesdorf Talent Award: Constant Swinkels

With his irrepressible enthusiasm, ecologist Constant Swinkels has been committed for many years to restoring biodiversity in the Netherlands. For his PhD research, he is looking at the interaction between plants and pollinators and how we can help insect populations recover. In the process, he mainly surveys dikes and has spent many springs and summers counting all the flowers and pollinators on a dike. His research builds on the Future Dikes project and makes an important contribution to nature-restoring dikes.

Swinkels is often invited by media such as NOS, RTL Nieuws and Trouw to interpret insect news, and he is also a regular contributor to regional media such as RN7 and Omroep Gelderland. With his colleague, Robin van Lexmond, he also enthusiastically shared his knowledge at Het Klokhuis. Swinkels took presentation training courses at In'to Languages, was open to the wackiest ideas of his Faculty and University and gave lectures in Artis and at InScience, among other places. For Faces of Science he writes blogs and communicates about ecological research. He seizes every opportunity to engage in science communication and spreads his message wherever he can: we need to act right now and change how we treat our natural environment, or else things will get much worse still.

Last year, Swinkels and his colleagues put together a brand-new interdisciplinary course (Governance of Nature Conservation) in which ecology, law and management students work on the ‘wicked problem’ of nature management in the Hatertse Vennen.