International contacts

Belgium

Linus Vanlaere, Prof Mieke Grypdonck and other Flemish fellow travellers in Belgium, organised around the Care-Ethical Lab of sTimul.

South-Africa

Prof Andries Baart is extraordinary professor of the Optentia Research Focus Area at the Vaal Triangle Campus of the North-West University in South Africa. With Prof Jaco Hoffman, he is working on different projects around ageing in South-Africa. On 5 May 2025, he presented the book Relational Caring and Presence Theory in Health Care and Social Work, published by himself and Guus Timmerman, at the North-West University. One can find the presentation on Youtube: Relational Caring: A Soft Voice in Transforming Society.

Several staff members have contact with Prof Emmerentia du Plessis, fulltime professor at the School of Nursing of the North-West University in South Africa, and her fellow researchers into Caring Presence in Nursing. Besides doing research, they maintain a website and a platform on YouTube.

In 2021, Prof du Plessis has published the volume ‘Reflecting on Presence in Nursing: A Guide for Nursing Practice and Research’, with contributions from, among others, Andries Baart, Elly Beurskens, Jan den Bakker, and Guus Timmerman.

Canada

Albert Banerjee is a gerontologist ‘interested in the existential assumptions that have shaped the Western approach to healthy living and dying’. He is involved with the website Imagining Age-Friendly “Communities within Communities” and the YouTube platform Imagine Aging. He has kindly helped us  with his feedback on ‘Cultivating quality awareness in corona times‘, now published in: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy.