Welcome to the personal website of Joost Jongerden

Joost Jongerden is Assistant Professor at the Critical Technology Construction (CTC) research group of the Social Sciences Department of the Wageningen University & Research (WUR). He obtained a MSc in rural sociology at the Wageningen University in 1991 and a PhD in social sciences in 2006. In between he worked at the Wageningen University, doing research and coordinating projects in the field of technology and development studies, with an emphasis on spatial issues and the construction of identities, but was also involved in documentary making in war-affected areas and worked as a director of a foundation on urban and social issues.

He started his academic study in rural sociology in 1985. During his study he was also active in the movement of the eighties, an autonomous political movement doing politics beyond and outside the formal institutions, and transcending the modern dualism between knowing and doing. After obtaining his MSc degree in 1991 he left to Iraq for the making of a documentary on the consequences of the international sanctions against Iraq on the civilian population. After visiting the northern part of the country, he became involved in the making of a documentary on the uprising of the Kurds against the Ba’ath regime and efforts of a provisional Kurdistan regional government to reconstruct the rural countryside, depopulated during numerous army campaigns between 1987 and 1988. He also became involved in raising funds for reconstruction and development of the countryside.

The indelible encounter with the so-called ‘Kurdish issue’ would eventually lead to his PhD study about rural planning (the construction of space) and the Kurdish issue (the construction of identities). After obtaining a grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO) he worked on his PhD between 2001 and 2005, doing most of his fieldwork in Turkey/Kurdistan. His PhD thesis tries to explain how migration, settlement and resettlement policies and practices have been part of a larger project of political and cultural engineering in Turkey. A revised version of his thesis is published in 2007 by Brill Academic Publishers under the title The Settlement Issue in Turkey and the Kurds, An analysis of spatial policies, modernity and war. He published several articles and presented various papers on the organization of space, governance and the production of identities, with an emphasis on Turkey and he Kurds.

He is teaching courses to undergraduate and graduate students and is involved in the supervision of Ph.D. students, both at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam as the Wageningen University. He is coordinating an interdisciplinary and international research program on local development and technology. Related to the research program he organized several international workshops. Apart from that, he was organizer of an international conference, organized in Kyoto (Japan), November 3-5, 2007.

Research interest. Key words characterizing his research are urban-rural transformation (the production of space/place), the social construction of technological artifacts and the social construction of identities.  In his work he has a strong area focus on Turkey and Kurdistan, but he is also involved in research in the Netherlands, India, Ecuador and Ghana.