Mandy de Wilde is assistant professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University. She draws on environmental anthropology, political ecology, and STS to explore the economic valuation of indigenous and introduced crops as part of sustainable farming in age of climate crisis and biodiversity loss, mostly in Northern Europe.

More information about Mandy de Wilde

Current research projects

Guided by the buzz phrase ‘farming with nature’, some agricultural lands and waters across Europe become experimental sites for sustainable farming in an effort to diversify these simplified ecologies and make them climate-resilient, while retaining their economic function. Farmers, scientists, and consumers play an important mediating role in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, restoring biodiversity loss, and realising profit. Mandy’s current research project investigates how these – sometimes conflicting – concerns are negotiated in practices to do with the innovation, cultivation, and consumption of indigenous and introduced crops. These practices and concerns shape ‘agrarian worlds’ which are composed of, and compose, ecological as well as economic relations, but draw together social and cultural relations as well. All these relations carry histories and shape futures, most notably along the lines of (1) who or what belongs to a landscape and (2) how to value these modes of belonging, economically. By answering these questions, Mandy’s project aims to reconceptualise categories and concepts to do with, respectively, ‘indigeneity’ and ‘commodification’.

She currently conducts fieldwork in PolderLab Vrouwe Venne, a degraded peatland just outside Leiden, where she participates in experimental farming with wet crops such as rice, cranberry, and water soldier.

Previous research projects

Previously, Mandy has worked on a variety of topics, focusing on the valuing of vibrant matter such as renewable energy, sewage, and waste in practices of households, of natural scientists, and of rats. She has explored the feminised and feminist implications of these valuations in journals such as Science, Technology, and Human Values and The Sociological Review; foregrounded their implicit more-than-human relationality in Ethnos and Engaging Science, Technology, and Society; and reconceptualised political agency and ethics as extending beyond the human in Political and Legal Anthropology Review and Ambio: A Journal of Environment and Society.

For her doctorate Mandy connected an ethnography of everyday life in a disadvantaged urban neighbourhood in Amsterdam to literature about the role of affects in the construction of citizenship. She argued that a governmental strategy of affective citizenship propagates specific norms to do with belonging that are both culturist and gendered in Citizenship Studies and Home Cultures: Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space; and showed how varied relations between community initiatives and governance actors affect who is enabled to (re)claim urban space in Urban Studies and Local Environment. She also co-edited an edited volume Als meedoen pijn doet: Affectief burgerschap in de wijk (2013) about how it is that a benevolent government can discourage benevolent citizens so much.

Prior to joining Leiden University, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Anthropology Department at the University of Amsterdam (2019-2022), the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University (2016 – 2018) and the Centre on Research on Environmental and Social Change at the University of Antwerp (2015). She has also been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh (2019), the DEMAND centre at Lancaster University (2017), and the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University Berlin (2013). She received her doctorate from the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (2015).

Teaching

Mandy supervises master students who are interested in topics to do with pollution (of any sort), farming (of plants, animals, or other living entities), the climate crisis, and environmental issues more broadly. If, as a student, you are also interested in these topics and want to discuss a possible MSc thesis project or research internship, do email Mandy.

She also contributes to the bachelor programme of CADS and Urban Studies by coordinating the following courses:

• Economy & Ecology: introduces students to anthropological perspectives on relationships between political economies and the environment (CADS, second year elective)
• Anthropological Research in Practice: familiarises students with anthropological research methods (CADS, first year course)
• The Production of Belonging: explains key theoretical insights in anthropology and cognate disciplines about urban practices of belonging of both human and more-than-human inhabitants of cities (Urban Studies, second year elective)