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.
Forests and Climate Crisis
As a Marie Curie scholar at the Life Science and Society Lab (KU Leuven, 2021-2022) and during my NWO-funded Veni project (2022-2025), I explored how imaginaries of resilience to future stressors and shocks are reshaping environmental management practices, focusing specifically on forests and forest-society relations. 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. 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.
Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences
- vanoorschot@essb.eur.nl
More information
Work
- Sophie van Balen & Irene van Oorschot (2025) - Composing climate change as a matter of everyday living: Thinking against displacement - Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space - doi: 10.1177/23996544251321619
- Irene van Oorschot & Sophie van Balen (2024) - Sensing and making sense of climate change in a Western European urban setting: Bodily exposures, uncertain epistemologies, and climatic care practices - Sociological Review - doi: 10.1177/00380261241274874 - [link]
- Irene van Oorschot, Giorgio Touburg, Alexander Strelkov & Gabriele Jacobs (2024) - Grounds for Cooperation in the Radicalisation Governance Milieu?: A Qualitative Exploration of Stakeholder Issue Frames of Online Radicalisation - Perspectives on Terrorism, 18 (3), 135-151 - doi: 10.19165/2024.7550
- Irene van Oorschot, Sophie van Balen & Annelies Kuijpers (2024) - Panel: In the wake of ecological disaster: Navigating pasts and generating futures - [link]
- Irene van Oorschot & Sophie van Balen (2023) - De antipolitiek van klimaatrichtlijnen - [link]
- Sophie van Balen & Irene van Oorschot (2023) - Weathering the Modern Tempest
- Irene van Oorschot & Sophie van Balen (2023) - Sensing change, changing sense: Exploring Sensational Epistemologies for Transdisciplinary Practice
- Jess Bier, Jiska Engelbert, Zouhair Hammana, Vatan Huzeir, Irene van Oorschot, Willem Schinkel & Rogier van Reekum (2022) - ‘Het CvB kiest voor geweld tegen studenten: wat leert dat ons?’ - Erasmus Magazine - [link]
- Sophie van Balen & Irene van Oorschot (2022) - Exposure to the urban climate: Attunement, weathering, and atmospheric care - [link]
- Irene van Oorschot & Amade M’charek (2021) - Keeping race at bay: familial DNA research, the ‘Turkish Community,’ and the pragmatics of multiple collectives in investigative practice - BioSocieties, 16 (4), 553-573 - doi: 10.1057/s41292-021-00246-4 - [link]
- Jeff Handmaker, Isabel Awad Cherit, Layal Chaker, Irene van Oorschot, Federica Violi & Rima Rassi (2024) - Gaza and Lebanon: One year on(going) (Participant)
Activiteit: Organising and contributing to an event › Academic - Isabel Awad Cherit, Irene van Oorschot, Jeff Handmaker & Gabriele Helfert (2024) - Towers of Ivory and Steel: Scrutinising our university's complicities and possibilities (Organiser)
Activiteit: Organising and contributing to an event › Popular - Sophie van Balen & Irene van Oorschot (2023) - Everyday Ingenuities (Participant)
Activiteit: Attending an event › Academic - Irene Oorschot & Willem Schinkel (2015) - Het dossier als grensobject: Allo- en autoreferentie in het strafrecht (Speaker)
Activiteit: Oral presentation › Academic - Irene Oorschot (2014) - Case Files in Action: Folding and Unfolding Practices in Legal Truth-finding (Speaker)
Activiteit: Oral presentation › Academic - Irene Oorschot (2014) - Ironie als Situatie: Saint Orlan's Lichaamskunst (Speaker)
Activiteit: Oral presentation › Popular - Irene Oorschot (2014) - Sociologie (Journal) (Editor)
Activiteit: Publication Peer-review › Academic - Irene Oorschot (2013) - 'Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?' Feministische Kennis- en Wetenschapskritiek (Speaker)
Activiteit: Oral presentation › Academic
3.2 Sociologische vraagstukken 6
- Year
- 2024
- Course Code
- ESSB-S3020