I am Anna Elisabeth (Annelies) Kuijpers an anthropologist working on climate induced floods from a post-humanist perspective. I started Mud Matters! in September 2023 with a NWO XS Scholarship at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Here I focused on the aftermath of the 2021 floods in Limburg, the Netherlands.
In October 2024 I joined the LAMC at the ULB Brussels, as a postdoctoral researcher with a FNRS grant to continue to work on the Mud Matters! project. This allows me to further comparative research in Germany and Belgium in places that were hit by the same disaster and its aftermath.
For my PhD (2021 Zurich ISEK, Switzerland) 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