About Ina De Quint
I am interested in what we have come to take for granted.
I am Ina De Quint: writer, sociologist, entrepreneur and systems thinker. I explore the stories we use to explain our world, the structures hidden behind them, and the room to organise things differently.
You could describe my work as a collection of very different roles. I did research, worked in recruitment and commercial advisory, built a company, published stories and develop social initiatives. Yet for me it always comes back to the same question: why do we accept certain rules, habits and power relations as if they were laws of nature? And what happens when we dare to examine those assumptions?
I rarely start from a ready-made answer. I listen, make connections and look for the pattern behind the individual case. Then I want to know whether another model is conceivable, and what it would take in real life.
01 · Learning to see
Some questions arise long before you have words for them.
Wat liefde is (What love means) · published in Kwetsbaar Krachtig (2018)
“Carefully testing the waters, on tiptoe, taking the temperature of the room.”
“I think that is love. Of that, I am quite certain.”
“I think that is not love. Of that, I am quite certain.”
A child cannot always distinguish love from the ways it learns to keep that love safe. It learns to read silences, anticipate moods and keep secrets. Only later do words emerge for what once seemed normal. But how do you speak about that uncertainty without reducing the mother you love to her vulnerability?
About this contribution
In “Wat liefde is” (“What love means”), I write about growing up as the daughter of a mother living with mental health challenges. From the perspectives of the child I was and the adult daughter looking back, I explore how closeness and fear, loyalty and confusion could coexist — and how understanding grew without erasing the past.
Full original text in Dutch · published in 2018
02 · A language for the pattern
From human behaviour to the systems behind it.
My background in the sociology of work and organisations, and in psychology, gave me words for what I already wanted to understand intuitively: behaviour never happens in a vacuum. The rules of an organisation, the expectations of a group, economic incentives and unequal room to manoeuvre all shape what someone does and what seems possible.
For my master's thesis at the University of Antwerp, in 2008, I spoke with young people of around twenty-five, with and without higher education, and with employers in the Antwerp region. I wanted to know how they saw work and careers. I was their peer myself, and I did not want to hide that.
“Ik wil deze doelgroep op een wetenschappelijk verantwoorde manier een stem geven”TranslationI want to give this group a voice in a scientifically sound way
What I heard shifted familiar images. Graduates turned out to be less career-driven than expected and mostly sought balance. Young people with less formal education often had big dreams that found little footing. Jobseekers experienced activation policy as control without prospects, and employers doubted its effect just as much. It was qualitative research with a small group, not a measurement of a generation. It did teach me to listen to those who are mostly talked about in a policy debate. My master's thesis was awarded great distinction.
Master's thesis · University of Antwerp · 2008 · published on the Flemish Scriptiebank
03 · Innovating from within
In every organisation I looked for the place where something new could begin.
Even as an employee I behaved more like an entrepreneur. As a recruitment consultant I set up a new segment for senior management profiles in retail, from the first client relationships to the hires themselves. Wherever I worked, I deliberately sought out the new projects, the side steps in content and the places where something could be done more efficiently or more cleverly.
At SD Worx, working with large SMEs, my way of doing commercial work took shape. Listen and analyse first. Teach myself the client's subject matter until I understood their question better than the first meeting suggested. Earn trust by sharing knowledge. Only then propose a solution. Selling became a form of understanding.
I also shared that way of thinking as a guest speaker, in presentations for higher education and employers' organisations. I saw how decisions can look logical on paper while their consequences land somewhere else. That made me more critical of the gap between policy intentions and lived reality.
“Dingen doen die ik goed kan, dat is nooit een motivatie geweest om het te blijven doen.”TranslationDoing things I am good at has never been a reason for me to keep doing them.
04 · Community initiative · Antwerp
During my maternity leave, a collection drive became a local solidarity project.
When families arrived in Belgium during the refugee crisis, I had just become a mother. I started collecting baby things, toiletries, clothes, blankets and toys. With a network of other mothers, that grew into a local project which I set up and coordinated.
Thanks to the cooperation of the Federation of Moroccan Associations in Borgerhout, we were able to collect and sort donations. Part of them went to families at the reception centre on Linkeroever. With donated clothing we also organised an accessible solidarity market for families in Borgerhout. The proceeds were spent at the children's shop The Little Ones on toy parcels; the remaining goods went to Al Ikram.
Perhaps the most valuable part was the meeting afterwards: mothers from the reception centre and mothers from the neighbourhood, together with their children. Not an anonymous aid model, but people organising resources and attention where they were needed.
There I discovered again how quickly things can move once people stop waiting for a problem to become someone else's.
An informal neighbourhood initiative at the time, not an organisation or ongoing project.
05 · Entrepreneurship · Captain Cork, 2018–2023
An alternative only really counts once you try to build it.
In 2018 I founded Captain Cork, a Belgian brand of sustainable accessories made from Portuguese cork, a plant-based alternative to leather. From brand idea to brand strategy: our own concept store in Antwerp, international e-commerce, business clients, storytelling and media. In June 2019 I won the entrepreneurs' competition Win je winkel, and with it a shop in Beveren.
I wanted to find out whether an attractive commercial product could also be organised around ecological and social principles. For packing and finishing the bags I worked with Noordheuvel, a social enterprise employing people at a distance from the labour market. With the Retail School I tried to make retail expertise affordable for other small business owners.
That ambition brought choices and compromises: production, logistics, marketing, people, investment, growth. I learned how hard it is to keep a social ideal standing within the logic of a competitive market.
The company eventually ceased to exist. The knowledge gained along the way did not disappear with it. Since then I have been asking a question larger than my own story: what is the promise of a second chance worth when it does not carry through administratively?
Captain Cork and the Retail School are closed chapters, not current activities.
Watch, listen, read (in Dutch)
Do you recognise a question you are working on yourself?
06 · Autonomy
There is more than one caring way to shape a life.
In my own life, too, I have noticed how many social expectations rest on a single family model. After a divorce I deliberately chose a form of solo and parallel parenting, without seeking a new blended family. That is my choice, not a prescription for anyone else.
What occupies me is how little room we sometimes leave for different, caring ways of living, and how autonomy can be organised within responsibility.
07 · Writing and imagination
What goes untold rarely finds a place in our memory.
What I saw inside systems, I also want to question in public: who falls outside them, and who gets to tell the story? My contribution to Kwetsbaar Krachtig was a personal way of speaking. With Forgotten Women in History: Her Voice, Reclaimed! I turn my gaze to historical women whose work, courage or knowledge often faded into the background of dominant histories.
In the podcast I use historical research and fictional, AI-supported conversations as a narrative form. The interviews are reconstructions, not real recordings or verbatim historical testimony. The question behind them is very real, though: who is remembered, and who gets to write history?
In my essays I explore the same question through relationships, organisations, economic systems, care and autonomy.
08 · Aurora Nexus · in development
I want to be able to test ideas against the lives they are meant for.
Today I give that work a home in Aurora Nexus: a freely accessible starting point for essays, research, stories, counter-voices and new proposals. I do not see it as a stage where my vision gets the last word. Rather as a collection of questions that others are welcome to answer.
Female Lodges explores a contemporary form in which women of different generations can exchange knowledge and strengthen communities. Be Safe, Girl! starts from another, urgent question: why do women still organise their freedom of movement around a lack of safety? The first concept concerns safe mobility for young women; a pilot is being prepared and is not yet operational.
These are proposals that need collaboration, testing and critical voices. A convincing idea is not yet a working system.
Female Lodges and Be Safe, Girl! are both in development.
In conversation
Which certainty would you like to examine again?
Perhaps you are developing a project of your own. Perhaps you work in an organisation where the familiar answers no longer suffice. Or you recognise something in one of my stories and want to set another perspective beside it.
Sharing a thought is always welcome. If you want to explore a substantive question, a publication, a thinking partnership or social collaboration, I invite you to a first conversation. What grows from it is professional, paid work, with agreements that are fair to both sides.
The collaboration and contribution pages are in Dutch. You are welcome to write in English; your own mail app sends the message, nothing is sent from this site.