Website of Vanessa Wijngaarden

Dr. Vanessa Wijngaarden is a research professor at the University of Liège and a senior research associate at the University of Johannesburg. Recurring themes in her work include ‘othering’, multivocality in academia, and human-animal relationships, as she aims to bridge different worlds.

With a passion for reflexive and dialogical approaches she engages in extensive fieldwork, methodological innovation and creative research dissemination. Her openness towards multiple ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies, subjects dominant and taken-for-granted experiences, assumptions and motivations to critique. Currently, she leads a daring ERC research project that engages with intuitive interspecies communication in different societies and contexts, in order to develop practical strategies to cross the nature/culture dichotomy and collaborate with non-human animals as subjects, agents and full research participants.

She holds cum laude BA and MA degrees in both cultural anthropology and sociology of non-Western societies (sub-Saharan Africa) and political science (international relations) from the University of Amsterdam, with components from the International School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Amsterdam, the Unversity of Calgary and Leiden University. Her PhD in social anthropology was obtained at the University of Bayreuth, with a double-sided ethnography on the interplay between imagery and interactions in cultural tourism encounters between tourists and Maasai in Tanzania, contributing to innovative methodological and epistemological debates in anthropology and tourism studies. This includes the introduction of Q method into the anthropological discipline, as well as developing strategies to use its written statements with non-readers.

As an ethnographic filmmaker she has spent years in East-African Maasailand. The documentaries she produced with the Maasai communities she lived with have been screened and awarded worldwide and used in courses at universities in Europe, North America and Africa.

She teaches Q methodology and works as an ATLAS.ti registered consultant and certified senior professional trainer.