dr. I (Irene) van Oorschot

Biography

Irene van Oorschot is an assistant professor at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. 

Her current research focus is on practices of climate adaptation and mitigation in everyday life and within environmental management practices specifically. Her recent Marie Curie Individual Fellowship (KU Leuven) investigated the circulation of the promissory notion of 'ecological resilience' in national and supranational policy, while her current Veni (Dutch Research Council) ethnographically explores how this notion of 'resilience' is practiced by front-line environmental managers. She is interested in particular in the way the reality of climate change is shifting practices of ecological valuing, and is generative of new knowledges as well as uncertainties. Informed by Science and Technology Studies and the environmental humanities, she examines how 'resilience' in an age of climate crisis is generative of novel modes of caring for the environments. In a similar vein she was the PI on a one-year research project 'Sensing Change' (funded by the NGO Rotterdams Weerwoord), which explored how Rotterdam citizens sense, and make sense of, climate change in their everyday lives. 

Previously, she has worked on a variety of topics, focusing specifically on the everyday production and mobilization of knowledges and judgments. Her recent monograph with Cambridge University Press, The Law Multiple: Judgment and Knowledge in Practice (2021) offers an ethnographically based and conceptually rich account of legal practices and sociological knowledges. She has also published on the production of (genetic) difference in forensics and law for journals such as BioSocieties and Social & Legal Studies.