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Purpose – In this chapter, we explore how normalization of exclusionary practices and of privilege for seemingly same professionals and disadvantage for seemingly different professionals in academic healthcare organizations can be challenged via meaningful culturalization in the interference zone between system and life world, subsequently developing space for belonging and difference.

Methodology – This nested case study focusses on professionals’ narratives from one specific setting (team) within the broader research and research field of the Dutch academic hospital (Abma & Stake, 2014). We followed a responsive design, conducting interviews with cultural minority and majority professionals and recording participant observations.

Findings – In the Netherlands, the instrumental, system-inspired business model of diversity is reflected in two discourses in academic hospitals: first, an ideology of equality as sameness, and second, professionalism as neutral, rational, impersonal and decontextual. Due to these discourses, cultural minority professionals can be identified as ‘different’ and evaluated as less professional than cultural majority, or seemingly ‘same’, professionals. Furthermore, life world values of trust and connectedness, and professionals’ emotions and social contexts are devalued, and professionals’ desire to belong comes under pressure.

Value – Diversity management from a system-based logic can never be successful. Instead, system norms of productivity and efficiency need to be reconnected to life world values of connectivity, personal recognition, embodied knowledge and taking time to reflect. Working towards alternative safe spaces that generate transformative meaningful culturalization and may enable structural inclusion of minority professionals further entails critical reflexivity on power dynamics and sameness–difference hierarchy in the academic hospital.

Examines the tenth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

Examines the ninth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

Researchers who work in partnership with older adults in participatory studies often experience various advantages, but also complex ethical questions or even encounter obstacles during the research process. This paper aims to provide insights into the value of an intersectional lens in participatory research to understand how power plays out within a mixed research team of academic and community co-researchers.

Four academic researchers reflected in a case-study approach in a dialogical way on two critical case examples with the most learning potential by written dialogical and via face-to-face meetings in duos or trios. This study used an intersectionality-informed analysis.

This study shows that the intersectional lens helped the authors to understand the interactions of key players in the study and their different social locations. Intersections of age, gender, ethnicity/class and professional status stood out as categories in conflict. In hindsight, forms of privilege and oppression became more apparent. The authors also understood that they reproduced traditional power dynamics within the group of co-researchers and between academic and community co-researchers that did not match their mission for horizontal relations. This study showed that academics, although they wanted to work toward social inclusion and equality, were bystanders and people who reproduced power relations at several crucial moments. This was disempowering for certain older individuals and social groups and marginalized their voices and interests.

Till now, not many scholars wrote in-depth about race- and age-related tensions in partnerships in participatory action research or related approaches, especially not about tensions in research with older people.