Petra Tjitske Kalshoven
petratjitske.kalshoven@manchester.ac.uk
Petra Tjitske is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Manchester, and the principal investigator of the Mimesis In Action research project.
She carries out the ethnographic inquiry in West Cumbria in England, Borsele in the Netherlands, and is currently on fieldwork in Caithness in Scotland.
Her research draws on insights from ecological anthropology, materiality, and performance studies to explore skilled manifestations of human curiosity, simulation, and rhetoric. With The Mimesis in Action project, she pursues her interest in human engagement with models, landscapes, and temporalities in areas of long-term nuclear waste management.
Sarah O’Brien
sarah.obrien-2@manchester.ac.uk
Sarah is a postdoctoral research associate on the Mimesis In Action project, based at the University of Manchester.
She is responsible for the ethnographic fieldwork in La Hague, France, which will take place over a total of twelve months.
Sarah completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, on issues of energy and climate ethics in Lancashire, UK. She conducted twelve months of ethnographic research with a community resisting the development of the shale gas industry (associated with hydraulic fracturing) and has written on notions of truth, action and responsibility in protest settings.
Linking her doctoral research and her current work with the Mimesis project are reflections on the temporalities and ethics that shape energy realities. How do time horizons and ethical reflections inform one another in constituting landscapes? How do different ethical and temporal frameworks connect and co-exist? What is amenable to change and transformation in diffrent landscapes, and what is considered to be essential?
Research CollaboratorS
Providing valuable research insights to this interdisciplinary project are Dutch researchers Dr Susan van ’t Klooster and Dr Wieger Wamelink.
We regularly exchange ideas at our team meetings in the Netherlands, where they also help design the workshops that we organize in our different fieldwork settings. As active participants at the workshops, Susan and Wieger provoke us into thinking about what it actually means to do interdisciplinary work and collaborate in research outputs that blend our particular writing styles, anchored as these are in our particular disciplines.
Susan is an independent foresight researcher and consultant interested in decision-making in contexts of deep uncertainty. Wieger is senior ecologist at Wageningen University & Research.
Susan van ’t Klooster
Wieger Wamelink
It is no coincidence that Susan’s and Wieger’s particular areas of expertise have blossomed in the Netherlands, a country known for its belief in and culture of maakbaarheid (engineerability) and for its concomitant tradition in foresight and scenario planning, rooted in its vulnerability to flooding.
Wieger has ample experience with scenario planning focusing on landscape and ecosystem development (including many reports written for the Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency). He is one of the WUR scientists who developed a vision for a greener Netherlands in 2120, which has been inspirational to Mimesis in Action: https://magazines.wur.nl/climate-solutions-en/the-netherlands-in-2120/.
Susan advises on policy and decision making in contexts of deep uncertainty. Having published extensively on foresight, futuring and risk assessment, she sits on think tanks and advisory committees and has provided analyses for knowledge institutes and governmental institutions – including the Dutch Delta Program, a national programme charged with protecting the Netherlands against flooding and ensuring there is enough fresh water.
For more information on Susan’s research, please see https://savia.nl
For more information on Wieger’s research, please see https://www.wur.nl/en/persons/wieger-wamelink.htm
This is an ESRC-funded project running from May 2022 to May 2026.
MIMESIS IN ACTION: Nuclear Decomissionning as playground for societal and ecological future-making.CONTACTS:
petratjitske.kalshoven@manchester.ac.uk
sarah.obrien-2@manchester.ac.uk