dr. I (Irene) van Oorschot

Biography

Spanning a variety of subjects and research contexts, my academic career is characterized by an enduring interest in knowledge production and valuing practices, and a strong focus on ethnographic research methods. I am inspired and informed by science and technology studies, decolonial ecology, and feminist scholarship. I am PI on the ERC Starting Grant EUFORESTS (2027-2032). 

Climate Crisis and the Good Forest: The Promise of Resilience

As PI on Unearthing, Comparing, and Conceptualizing the Value(s) of Resilience across European Forest Worlds (EUFORESTS) I explore how forest resilience - a policy imaginary fast gaining traction across Europe's contested forests - is enacted in practice. While often approached as an unquestioned good or condemned as ‘neoliberal governmentality’, I am interested in how resilience invites new ways of knowing, managing, and governing environments and human-nature relationships, and in the uncertainties, speculations, and anticipations that characterize future-oriented forest work. Here, I build on a longer standing engagement with resilience, facilitated by a MSCA fellowship at the Life Science and Society Lab at the KU Leuven (2021-2022), and a Veni grant (2022-2025). Together with J. Asselin (University of Lethbridge) and A. Konczal (Wageningen University) I coordinate FORAGE: The Forest Anthropology Working Group on Europe and Beyond that brings together anthropologists, ethnographers, and social scientists across disciplines who engage in forest-related research. 

Climate Change and Urban Life: The Role of the Body

As a PI on the Can You Sense Change project (2021-2022), funded by the Rotterdam NGO Rotterdams Weerwoord, I developed an approach to climate change that engages the role of the body and the senses and examines how and where urban dwellers in Rotterdam encounter and make sense of global warming in their everyday life. The concept of climatic care practices developed in the Sociological Review has allowed  my team and I to bring into view emerging improvisations and practices of care that people develop to mitigate their exposure to weather extremes, while our work also repositions climate change in the present in Environment and Planning C. 

Forensics, Race, and Law

As a postdoctoral researcher, I studied how biological markers of difference inform and shape the production, mobilization, and contestation of forensic knowledges, specifically in Court settings. Drawing on science and technology studies of forensics, genetics, and race, my contributions have appeared The Palgrave Handbook for the Anthropology of Technology, the Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory, Biosocieties, and in Social Studies of Science. 

Legal Practice and Documents

As PhD researcher, I  explored how judges make sense of cases - and role played in these practices by material objects, specifically of case files. Resulting in the cum laude defense of my dissertation in 2018 and the publication of The Law Multiple: Judgment and Knowledge in Practice by Cambridge University Press in 2021, my work continues to inform conversations in migration law, the anthropology and sociology of law, and socio-legal studies and has appeared in The Journal of Law & Society, Environment and Planning C,  Social & Legal Studies, Symbolic Interaction, as well as in various edited collections.