Dr Tanja D. Hendriks
IAS Open Programme
KU Leuven
Dr Tanja D. Hendriks is an FWO-funded postdoctoral research fellow at KU Leuven in Belgium where she runs her research project entitled ‘Duty and Diligence in Disasters: civil servants and the climate change crisis in Malawi’. She is a fellow at the African Studies Centre Leiden University and at the Centre for Social Research, a research arm of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Malawi. Her main research interests are in the anthropology of the state, bureaucracy, development and disasters.
Tanja has a background in anthropology (BA, 2012, University of Amsterdam), international development studies (MSc, 2015, University of Amsterdam) and African Studies (MA, 2016, Leiden University). Her PhD research formed part of the EU-funded project on the Anthropology of Human Security in Africa (ANTHUSIA), during which she was based at both the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh and the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo.
She defended her PhD thesis, titled The Malawi State in Relief: an ethnography of civil servants navigating duties, dependencies and disasters in a rural district, in September 2022. It zoomed in on the roles and responsibilities of Malawian civil servants in disaster relief interventions, highlighting their sense of duty.
During their IAS Fellowship, Dr Hendriks is collaborating with George Foden from the Department of Geography and Environment.