Joe Jaspers obtained a Researchmasters in philosophy (UvA), where he worked mainly on philosophical issues bridging aesthetics with ethics and epistemology: his bachelor thesis examined the moral concept of evil as an aesthetic judgement, while his masters explored the valuation of untruth in art with our moral valuation of truth in general, burrowing concepts from Nietzsche and Kant’s aesthetics.
He is part of Extreme Beliefs as a general intern, and helps develop educational material for extra-academic purposes. His own research aims at questioning the role of narrativity in extremist thinking. He aims to examine both how narratives function as a principle vehicle of extremist ideology, and more fundamentally how aspects of sense-making in narrative thinking are uniquely suitable to resonate with the psychology of extremism. After all, how can we understand the appeal of extremist narratives – and think more effectively about the potential of counter-narratives – without examining the particular meaning-making processes that are integral to the appeal of narratives as such?
