Annélies KUIJPERS

Adresse visiteur Laboratoire d'Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains Avenue Jeanne, 44 Bâtiment S 1050 Bruxelles Belgique Adresse courrier Université libre de Bruxelles Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, 50 - CP 124 1050 Bruxelles Belgique Anna Elisabeth (Annelies) Kuijpers

Bio

I am an anthropologist working on floods. I am joining the LAMC as a postdoctoral researcher (FNRS grant) with the "Mud Matters!" project. In this project, I study the long-term consequences of the 2021 floods in Belgium and Germany from the perspective of river mud. I work with mud as a material remainder and reminder of a flood, and examine how it engages with the ecological, public, and private domain. Through this perspective, I unravel long-term consequences on the ecological, bodily, material and emotional level.

For my PhD (2021), I conducted ethnographic research in southeast Turkey, in a village located on the banks of the Euphrates, two-thirds of which was submerged due to a large dam project. I investigated how the dammed river transformed from being a natural part of the ecosystem into a water supply resource, and how this transformation affected the local ecology and the way people lived with and from the river. I situated the hydroelectric dam infrastructure in a network of hydro-social relations that displayed a mutually co-constitutive connection between people, water, and land in discussing the production of place.

My fields of interest are the anthropology of water, ecology and development, climate change, posthumanist theories, vital materialism, and multi-species and sensorial ethnography.