Tanja Hendriks

Tanja Hendriks is a postdoctoral research fellow at the KU Leuven. Her current research project, funded by the FWO, is entitled ‘Duty and Diligence in Disaster: civil servants and the climate crisis in Malawi’. Broadly interested in the anthropology of the state, bureaucracy, disasters and development, Tanja’s research interests also include humour, ethnography, intergenerational power relations, the politics of language and storytelling. She is also a fellow at the African Studies Centre Leiden and at the Center for Social Research, a research arm of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Malawi.

Her PhD research was part of the EU-funded ANTHUSIA project, 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. Her PhD thesis, ‘‘The Malawi State in Relief: An ethnography of civil servants navigating duties, dependencies and disasters in a rural district’, focused on the role of Malawian civil servants in disaster relief interventions in the country and highlighted their sense of duty. Tanja obtained her PhD in September 2022, after passing her VIVA with no corrections.

Tanja Hendriks holds a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam (2012) a master’s degree in International Development Studies (MSc) from the University of Amsterdam (2015) and a research master’s degree in African Studies (MA) from Leiden University (2016). With her thesis for the latter she won the Africa Thesis Award 2016: "Home is always home". (Former) Street Youth in Blantyre, Malawi, and the Fluidity of Constructing Home. Tanja is currently a member of the Africa Thesis Award jury.