Thesis subject

Supervision Bram Jansen

I have a background in Cultural Anthropology, and in the past years I have been working on themes related to humanitarian aid and crisis response, (post)conflict intervention and refugee/forced migration and disaster studies. I have extensive fieldwork experience in East, Central and the Horn of Africa, more specifically Uganda, Kenya and South Sudan, and to a lesser extent in Nepal, Somalia and Ireland.

I encourage ethnographic research into the everyday practices and experiences with crises and crisis governance, such as humanitarian aid and government interventions, and the ways this impacts on local populations and institutions. Studying aid can take the form ‘Aidnography,’ in which the life worlds and practices of aid actors themselves become subject of study, but it can also focus on the experiences of people that are affected by and seek to cope with crisis, hazard and conflict and its aftermath. These processes and how they change over time as a result of global political and environmental circumstances, force us to rethink and reconceptualise disaster and crisis responses and emerging forms of crisis governance, coping strategies and technologies and innovation. I approach this reconceptualization from the bottom ‐ up, studying the ways of people, organizations and institutions on the ground, and how they cope and manoeuver in their everyday lives.

Fields of Expertise

  • Anthropology
  • Conflict
  • Ethnography
  • Humanitarian aid
  • Development sociology
  • War
  • Disaster studies
  • Migrants

Geographical Area

Eastern Africa