Mandy de Wilde is an ethnographer trained at the University of Amsterdam. She works across environmental anthropology, political ecology and valuation studies. Focusing on Northern Europe, she studies landscapes as shaped by humans, plants, animals and the elements together, and traces how they come to be valued in an age of climate crisis and biodiversity loss. Her research is guided by concerns about who or what belongs to a landscape, and about whose belonging comes to matter, or fails to matter, economically, culturally, and otherwise.

More information about Mandy de Wilde

Mandy de Wilde is an ethnographer trained at the University of Amsterdam. She works across environmental anthropology, political ecology and valuation studies. Focusing on Northern Europe, she studies landscapes as shaped by humans, plants, animals and the elements together, and traces how they come to be valued in an age of climate crisis and biodiversity loss. Her research is guided by concerns about who or what belongs to a landscape, and about whose belonging comes to matter, or fails to matter, economically, culturally, and otherwise.

Her interest in valuation also runs through Cleaning Amsterdam: Praxiography as Method (Mattering Press, also published in Dutch as Amsterdam Schoonmaken), written with Annemarie Mol, a book about what counts as ‘good’ in everyday practices and how to research it.

She contributes to the CADS research and teaching programmes as an assistant professor and coordinates the CADS Sustainability Research Cluster.

Current research

Mandy’s current projects share a common thread: they all ask how landscapes are valued, and by whom, as they are reshaped for climate and biodiversity goals, and who or what comes to belong there as nature is increasingly economised. In CurveBend, a project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), environmental scientists, social scientists and artists join efforts to bend the curve of biodiversity loss and promote a nature-positive society by mobilising collective action at the landscape level. Mandy contributes to the project with ethnographic research, including a PhD study on the transition from dairy farming to meadow bird farming in the Netherlands. In Entangled in Seaweed, a project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), anthropologists from Leiden University join researchers from the University of Edinburgh, Stellenbosch University and the Scottish Association for Marine Science. Together they examine who gains from the rapidly expanding seaweed sector in Scotland and South Africa, where colonial legacies still shape access to the sea, and under what conditions seaweed farming can benefit both people and nature. Mandy contributes to the project with ethnographic research, including a PhD study in Scotland that uses participant observation, visual storytelling and counter-mapping. In Meadow Rice (WeideRijst), a project funded by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), Mandy works with Wij.land, environmental scientists of Leiden University, farmers and local food partners to evaluate whether rice can become a viable wet crop on peatland at farms in the Boterhuispolder just outside Leiden. In Tracing Pollution, a project funded by a Starting Grant from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW), anthropologists examine how pollution, framed as a global challenge, materialises in local practices: in cities, on farms and in leisure activities. Using multimodal methods, the project traces how pollution is known, contested, cared for and valued, with special attention to more-than-human stakeholders. Mandy contributes to the project with ethnographic research into how chemical species such as carbon and nitrogen are valued in regenerative farming on depleted Dutch farmlands.

Previous research

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 CADS master’s students interested in pollution (of any sort), farming (of plants, animals or other living beings), the climate crisis and environmental issues more broadly. If that’s you, and you’d like to discuss an MSc thesis, do email her.

She coordinates the following courses in the interdisciplinary SfSS bachelor programme:

• Anthropology of Sustainability: introduces students to anthropological perspectives on how economies, societies and environments are interwoven (BSc Science for Sustainable Societies, first year course).
• Pollution and Power: combines environmental science and environmental anthropology to examine how pollutants such as noise, light, particulate matter, nitrogen and plastics are quantified and qualified, and whose lives they put at risk (BSc Science for Sustainable Societies, second year course).