ENP welcomes postdoc Marten Boekelo for research project on Storing Renewable Energy in Urban Households

Marten Boekelo has joined the NWO funded Uncertainty Reduction in Smart Energy Systems (URSES) research project for the subproject “Storing Renewable Energy in urban households” (StoRE).  

Marten comes to ENP from the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (University of Amsterdam) where he obtained his PhD in 2016 for the thesis “Of Citizens and Ordinary Men. Contestations of Sectarianism and Political Subjectivity in Reconstruction-Era Beirut”. His thesis combined perspectives from urban sociology and political anthropology in a study of public culture in Lebanon’s capital. More specifically, it related different vocabularies of citizenship to the nature of the urban spaces in which people spoke publically, their everyday experiences of the Lebanese state, and different ideological currents in Lebanese society (that of “civil society”, party ideology, and pan-Arabism most notably). The attention to citizenship and subjectivity carries over into StoRE’s interest in why consumers are adopting new technologies for sustainable energy consumption and how they are adapting to them.

In addition to these research endeavours, Marten has taught anthropology, political science and social science methodology at the University of Amsterdam and Amsterdam University College. He holds Master’s degrees from the Catholic University of Leuven (in Philosophy), VU University Amsterdam (in Anthropology), and the University of Chicago (in Social Sciences).