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Tag: Research

“The Netherlands Meat Land” campaign: Towards an ethnography of meat

By Irene Stengs – On 1 September 2022, the Dutch Central Organisation for the Meat Industry (COV, Centrale Organisatie voor de Vleessector), a partnership consisting of organizations involved in the production and processing of meat…

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Localising the pandemic: Understanding global disruption through online media

by Maddalena Conte It does not happen every day that a worldwide crisis completely overturns a discipline’s research methods, giving no choice but to experiment with new practices. This is exactly what is going on…

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Unpicking an (A)moral Anthropological Stance: Ongoing Violence in Myanmar

Introduction by Maaike Matelski In June 2015 the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology organized a seminar on account of the increasing number of Rohingya refugees in South East Asia. Since 2016 and in particular since…

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Occupational Hazards: experiences of a PhD student

By Martijn Dekker

The following text was presented as a column at the yearly PhD/MSR student conference of the VU Graduate School for Social Sciences, on the 23rd of September 2011.

I would like to use this opportunity to talk to you about the notion of ‘occupational hazards’.  Usually, these two words refer to dangerous situations that might occur at your workplace. Or injuries that can be caused by work-related activities.

 Interestingly enough, ‘Occupational Hazards’ is also the provisional title of my dissertation. But, since my research topic, which deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is all over the news every day already, and even more of late, I don’t want to bore you with that right now.  Instead, I want to briefly talk about occupational hazards in the literal sense:  about the pathologies, be they psychological or physical, a PhD or Research Master student may incur while doing his or her job. And I want to make this a personal story by zooming in on three of such pathologies I more or less suffered from and which I think may also sound familiar to some of you. These are: anxiety, guilt, and, what I would like to call, the “go it alone mentality”.

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