Vanessa Wijngaarden- PhD
- Associate Professor at University of Liège
Vanessa Wijngaarden
- PhD
- Associate Professor at University of Liège
About
30
Publications
14,703
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116
Citations
Introduction
Dr. Vanessa Wijngaarden is a research professor at the University of Liège and senior research associate at the University of Johannesburg, with a background in social anthropology and political science. She works on 'othering', multivocality in academia, and human-animal relationships, aiming to bridge different worlds. With a passion for reflexive approaches, extensive fieldwork and creative research dissemination, she is working on an ERC consolidator project regarding intuitive interspecies
Current institution
Publications
Publications (30)
In this paper, an Indigenous elder and non-Indigenous scholar together explore and reflect on attempts to grasp and work academically with the Maasai concept of osotua. We aim to take up this concept not as a piece of data to analyze, but as a partner in theoretical conversations. Osotua describes relationality, in the form of kinship, sharing, sym...
Animal communicators worldwide employ intuitive interspecies communication (IIC) to engage in detailed, two-way communication with non-human animals. IIC's potential for doing research with rather than on animals has insufficiently been tapped into, due to contingent onto-epistemological biases. Cooperating with animal communicators as interpreters...
As a participatory method combining qualitative and quantitative aspects, Q methodology has proven effective in academic as well as "practice-based" research and can be especially valuable in work with Indigenous groups and people who are in weak power positions. However, non-reading populations have often been excluded because procedures for sorti...
This collaborative, open educational resource brings together a collection of short pedagogical texts that help new learners understand complex theoretical concepts and disciplinary jargon from the critical social sciences. Each entry "shows" an element of theory using an "illustrative vignette”—a short, evocative story, visual or infographic, poem...
The narrative of evolutionist modernity is a former scientific theory which has fuelled and legitimized deeply harmful imperialist hierarchies, but increasingly influences how Maasai make sense of modernity. Borrowing from narratology and building on twelve years of intermittent ethnography in East-African Maasailand, I respond to recent calls for...
If science (natural, social, and humanities) is to be a truly global knowledge system, scientific endeavours have to move beyond dualistic binaries of Indigenous versus Western, towards a dynamic dialogic approach that centralizes intersubjectivity, relationship, and contextualisation. Despite its historic engagement with the reproduction of Wester...
Intuitive interspecies communication (IIC) involves detailed, non-verbal and non-physical communication between humans and other animals using a wide range of intuitive capacities. IIC and the growing number of animal communicators who practice it professionally have been virtually ignored in academic research in animal geographies and beyond. In r...
Much research is done across cultural divides and necessarily relies on intercultural communication. However, existing practical guidelines for interviewing generally remain blind to the culture of the interviewer in relation to the interviewees. This affects the quantity and quality of the data collected from research participants who do not share...
'Eliamani's Homestead' was shot as a result of long-term anthropological research in Tanzania and the translations were created in close cooperation with the Maasai research participants. Originally recorded for research purposes for a project on the relationship between images of and interactions with ‘the other’, the 20-minute single-shot include...
Eliamani's Homestead is an unfiltered presentation of unequal power relations, othering, suspicions, misunderstandings, and the untranslated in an exchange between Indigenous hosts and their guests in a cultural tourism setting. A family of Dutch tourists visits a Maasai homestead in Tanzania, where Eliamani and her child have no food. The tourists...
Maasai beaded ornaments are generally understood as traditional artifacts, but are in fact the result of modern developments. This case study refutes widespread assumptions about Maasai beadwork, showing that modernity cannot be captured accurately by the narrative of binary oppositions it has produced. I describe how the very presence, but also ma...
Non-academic article: https://theconversation.com/a-close-up-look-at-what-happens-when-tourists-and-maasai-communities-meet-84095
Non-academic article: http://theconversation.com/saviez-vous-que-les-perles-des-masa-venaient-deurope-84532
Newspaper article: http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2017/10/06/quand-des-touristes-occidentaux-rencontrent-des-masai-nobles-sauvages-de-leur-imaginaire_5197020_3212.html
Non-academic article: https://theconversation.com/quand-familles-masa-et-touristes-se-rencontrent-sous-loeil-de-la-camera-84924?utm
Non-academic article: https://theconversation.com/maasai-beads-the-interplay-between-europe-and-africa-84109
Tourism is a fruitful space to observe the interplay between mental images of ‘the other’ and interactions with this ‘other’. In this work, I have asked how Kisongo Maasai and Dutch tourists (re)construct, comment and strategize upon their images of each other in the context of cultural tourism encounters. What are the dynamics between image and ex...
Tourism studies scholars have criticized but not overcome the passivity inherent in analyses of the reproduction of stereotypes in tourism encounters. Problematizing the category of viewers, I open the black box of the circle of representation as a self-reinforcing process, showing how tourists’ (re)production of images of ‘the other’ is rooted in...
Europe and Africa seem so far apart, but they are intimately interconnected continents. Maasai are one of the greatest icons of Africa, and the image of warriors and women heavily bedecked with beads is a symbol of their traditional culture. What not many know, is that these beads actually come from Europe. They are still largely produced in the Ge...
Whereas other writers have recently presented Q method as an option for use in combination with traditional surveys, I employed the mind-mapping technique within a deeply qualitative approach. Showing how the Q method adds value to reflexive ethnography, I highlight the extended possibilities for its application in tourism studies. The method allow...
Understanding Maasai perceptions of whiteness can give insight in how and why images based on racial constructs continue to be (re)produced. Embedded in anthropological methods I used Q method with illiterate people to create detailed mindmaps of their images of ‘the other’ which can be compared to make visible more general social perspectives. The...
A language of development and humanitarianism has often been used to depoliticize political issues. In its speeches and reports, the World Bank has used theories of development and the idea of poverty reduction in an ideological way to legitimize and justify the existing hierarchy of power, making large-scale inequalities (morally) acceptable. The...
International attitudes of wildlife conservation highly influence daily livelihoods for the Taita and Maasai people living in areas adjoining the famous protected areas of Tsavo and Masai Mara in Kenya. While dealing with continuous competition, threats to life and large scale crop and livestock loss, the people, often secretly, continue to use the...
The World Bank is an international institution that is a mechanism of hegemony according to the five features characterised by Cox. 1. The World Bank is a product of the hegemonic world order. It came into existence as a result of international competition as well as a need for international cooperation. 2. The World Bank embodies rules which facil...
African cultural tourism is expanding, thriving on the idea that this is the moment to explore the last people untouched by civilization. At the same time, globalization has given indigenous peoples worldwide a growing opportunity to take the exploitation of the image that exists of them into their own hands. Regarded as ultimate ‘noble savages’ si...
Questions
Question (1)
We had a very successful preprint, uploaded with permission from the publisher. Now we paid the open access fee and uploaded the final published version. However, in the researchgate entry it still says preprint, and this cannot be changed in the edit version. We do not want to loose the 'reads' and 'quotations' counts, and we do not want to have two versions. How can we do this in resarchgate?
