Dr. Irene van Oorschot

Profile

I am a senior lecturer at Erasmus University College (ESSB), Erasmus University Rotterdam.

My research concentrates on concrete practices of knowing, valuing, and decision-making. Drawing on pragmatist philosophy and material-semiotics, I am especially interested in the intimate connections between knowledge and (e)valuation, or: the ways by which implicit or explicit normativities inform our grasp on the world – and the ways knowledges in turn shape our normative commitments to our possibilities within it. Trained as an ethnographer, I see social inquiry as an art of staying with the troubleOpens external.

I defended my dissertation called Ways of Case-MakingOpens external in 2018 (cum laude) at the sociology department of the EUR. Cambridge University Press recently published my monograph The Law Multiple: Judgment and Knowledge in PracticeOpens external (see hereOpens external for more!). In this book, I seek to trace how knowledge is made in and about legal practices. Ethnographically attending to the irreducibly material and temporal character of knowing and judging work, this book takes issue with overtly abstracted understandings of both ‘the Law’ and ‘Science’ and develops a conception of knowing and judging as concrete and material practices.

Working as a postdoctoral researcher at the anthropology department of the University of Amsterdam (Program Group Health, Care, and the BodyOpens external), I have focused on forensic and genetic knowledge production in the context of Prof. Amade M’charek’s RaceFaceID projectOpens external, zooming in on the role of biological race in forensic and legal settings.

Currently, I am developing an approach to environmental management that draws on my expertise in knowing and valuing practices and finds inspiration in feminist science and technology studies.

I can be found on google scholarOpens external and on research gateOpens external, as well as in my personal homepage: www.irenevanoorschot.comOpens external.

Current Research

‘Working with Nature’ in the Anthropocene: Environmental Management beyond Man the Controller

In the context of far-reaching and unpredictable climate change, environmental management and environmental policy discourse has witnessed the emergence of a novel environmental management paradigm: that of ‘fostering resilience’. Fostering the resilience of ecosystems is positioned not only as a way to maximize ecosystem’s abilities to respond to and bounce back from environmental stressors (e.g. pollution, floods, fires), but also as way to reconcile diverse social, economic, and ecological interests.

Conceptually, the rise of resilience disrupts anthropocentric understandings of the relationships between natural environments and environmental management. ‘Working with rather than against nature’ is a recurring slogan in environmental policy discourse. Drawing on Puig de la Bellacasa’s work on human-nonhuman constellations of care, this project seeks to conceptualize what novel relationships between humans and nonhumans are crafted and negotiated as a result of this rise of resilience. Moving beyond celebratory or critical accounts, it aims in particular to tease out possibilities to dissent-within resilience, articulating a novel ethics of environmental management.