Tim van de Meerendonk holds a PhD in anthropology and is currently a lecturer at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University. Tim teaches a variety of courses in the Bachelor’s programme and has been involved with the thesis track Diversity for the last several years.

More information about Tim van de Meerendonk

In his PhD research Tim takes an ethnographic approach to examine how insurance companies in India attempt to manage and mitigate climate risk. The promise of insurance is that it is able to accurately and fairly measure, calculate, price and compensate losses due to natural disaster. Working with farmers, insurance workers and local political activists, he shows that from the perspective of the intended beneficiaries, insurance is all but straightforward; Insurance blends into peoples’ economic lives in complicated ways, producing ambiguous outcomes and challenging deeply held beliefs about risk, responsibility, solidarity, fairness and suffering in the process.

Profile

Tim joined Leiden University as a PhD student in 2016. Before that he worked as an Ayslum Determination Officer at the Dutch Immigration Services (IND). Since 2017 he started as a lecturer at CADS, where he has since been teaching courses like Anthropological Research in Practice, FieldworkNL and Diversity and Power. He has also been involved in the supervision of the Bachelor thesis for the last several years. He completed his PhD on agriculture and insurance in India in March 2024.