Tanja Hendriks awarded Veni grant

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has announced that Tanja Hendriks, along with 17 Leiden University researchers, will receive a Veni grant, embedded at the ASCL. With this grant, Hendriks will be able to develop the research project 'Taking a Risk on Disasters: speculative humanitarianism amidst a changing climate in Malawi' in the following three years.

Based on weather forecasts and climate models, humanitarian organisations are increasingly funding and implementing interventions that attempt to protect people from possible future disasters. This is seen as a more sustainable, proactive way of disaster response in times of climate change, but also represents a significant political and moral shift in humanitarian policies and interventions. To understand the implications of this shift, this project develops the concept of speculative humanitarianism and investigates how government officials and humanitarian organisations in the present anticipate and speculate on disasters in the future. Ethnographic fieldwork will take place in Malawi, an aid-dependent African country affected by climate disasters every year.

Tanja Hendriks is a postdoctoral research fellow at the KU Leuven. Her current research project, funded by the FWO, is entitled ‘Duty and Diligence in Disaster: civil servants and the climate crisis in Malawi’. Broadly interested in the anthropology of the state, bureaucracy, disasters and development, Tanja’s research interests also include humour, ethnography, intergenerational power relations, the politics of language and storytelling. She is a fellow at the Center for Social Research, a research arm of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Malawi.

Her PhD research was part of the EU-funded ANTHUSIA project, during which she was based at both the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh and the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. Her PhD thesis focused on the role of Malawian civil servants in disaster relief interventions in the country and highlighted their sense of duty. 

Tanja Hendriks holds a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam (2012) a master’s degree in International Development Studies (MSc) from the University of Amsterdam (2015) and a research master’s degree in African Studies (MA) from Leiden University (2016).