Dr A.j. Van Hemert

Biography

Mieke van Hemert is a visiting researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at the VU University Amsterdam. She studies environmental issues from a science and technology studies (STS) perspective. Before venturing into research, she worked at the NGO Both Ends, the Physical Planning Department of the City of Amsterdam and as a freelance editor/copywriter. After finishing her MSc thesis on the ‘technological script’ in Dutch river management, she evaluated, together with John Grin, Jan van Tatenhove and Maarten Hajer, an interactive spatial planning project on the Veluwe Border Lakes drawing on insights from political science and STS. Her PhD thesis deals with river science as an emerging interdisciplinary research area, in which complexity thinking and remote sensing technology shape exchanges between ecologists, earth scientists and engineers as well as the river landscape. Together with Willem Halffman she studied the involvement of Dutch environmental NGOs with research and organised a workshop on the topic (EU project CRÊPE). A project at the Rathenau Institute, with Barend van der Meulen, focused on the role research programmes play in knowledge integration in river research and coastal research. Geo-engineering and its governance, with a focus on issues of scale and ignorance, will be studied in collaboration with Arthur Petersen and his group. A study of socio-ecological issues around the Godavari river and the Polavaram project in India, with Madhu Ramnath and Jayaprakash Polsani Rao, is in preparation.

Research Interest

 Environmental issues