Resilience: Tinkering with Lively Relations in Ruined Landscapes - VVI Research Meetings
- Date
- Wednesday 18 March 2026
- Time
- Address
-
Kamerlingh Onnes Building
Steenschuur 25
2311 ES Leiden - Room
- B0.25
Brief description:
Using the Dutch State Forestry Agency as a case study, I examine how the growing emphasis on resilience in forests contexts challenges more traditional approaches to forestry and raises new questions about how trees and forest life should be valued. Proceeding in two parts, my analysis first foregrounds how an emphasis on ‘resilience’ operates as an organizational response to both ecological and political uncertainties. Second, I shed light on shifts in the valuation of species and forest types as these are accompanying the rise of resilience discourse and practice in the Dutch forestry agency and explore the often quite uncertain and experimental modes of ongoing management and tinkering in and with forests resilience requires. By conceptualizing resilience as a normatively fraught and uncertain more-than-human bio- and metabolic project, this presentation helps us consider how resilience-based initiatives and projects do not only intervene in, and reshape, existing sociopolitical and policy arrangements, but also differentially value the work that trees do.
Bio:
Irene van Oorschot is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, affiliated with the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences. Her research lies at the intersection of sociology, science and technology studies (STS), and environmental humanities. Her research has explored topics such as judicial decision-making, forensic and genomic knowledge practices, and more recently the concept of resilience in environmental governance and climate change management. She received her PhD in sociology from Erasmus University Rotterdam, where her dissertation on judicial case-making examined how legal judgments are assembled in practice. This work led to her monograph The Law Multiple: Judgment and Knowledge in Practice, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.Before joining the faculty at Erasmus University, van Oorschot worked as a postdoctoral researcher and held a Marie Curie fellowship studying how the resilience is mobilized in environmental management. Her research draws on feminist STS and valuation studies to analyze how climate change and environmental uncertainty reshape professional knowledge and the ways ecosystems and species are valued.