Postdoctoral Researcher
Biography
Fenna Smits (1991) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Meertens Institute and the University of Amsterdam (program group: Health Care and the Body).
She specializes in environmental anthropology and investigates how environmental pollution is dealt with in professional and everyday knowledge practices.
Smits studied anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. In 2023, she obtained her PhD from the same university for her research on the decentralization of public health and environmental protection, in which she ethnographically investigated how infrastructural processes create new dependencies and relationships between people, technologies, and ecological systems. After obtaining her PhD, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the NWO-funded project Clean: an inquiry into co-existing values-in-tension (University of Amsterdam), led by Prof. Annemarie Mol. In this project, she investigated how the ideal of ‘clean water’ is pursued in practice in households, water management, and scientific practices, and how ecological problems surrounding water pollution are dealt with within those practices.
At the Meertens Institute, she is involved in the ERC-funded research project VITALGREENHOUSE (principal investigator: Dr. Rebeca Ibáñez Martín), which investigates crop cultivation in greenhouse horticulture as part of a vital ecological landscape in which relationships between multiple plant and animal species are central. Within this project, Smits investigates what sustainable cultivation, healthy eating, and care for ecosystems entail in an environment where pesticides are interwoven with everyday life.
Her fieldwork focuses on the knowledge practices through which forms of chemical exposure are experienced (through eating, breathing, and other everyday activities), measured (in scientific research and policy), diagnosed (in clinical care), or ignored, and on the tensions that arise when different versions of what constitutes healthy eating, bodies, and ecosystems clash. How are such conflicts of values about ‘healthy eating’ or a ‘healthy ecosystem’ dealt with in everyday practice? And whose vitality is served, or neglected, in policies that address exposure?
In this way, Smits hopes to contribute to discussions about how different ways of valuing sustainability are incorporated into institutional responses to the health and environmental problems associated with the use of toxic substances in greenhouse horticulture.
In addition to academic publications, she also explores this theme through audiovisual methods and is currently developing an auto-ethnographic film project in which care for human health is placed alongside biomonitoring practices for other species, in order to investigate toxicity and vitality across species.