In his academic work, Gerben Nooteboom prefers to work as an anthropologist in an interdisciplinary way and focuses on issues of social welfare, poverty, and inequality in ecological and agrarian change processes as outcomes of planned development, social policy and sustainable future making. He focusses specifically on the conceptual understanding and the empirical intersection of human adaptation, rural transformation, climate change and development. His longstanding interest in sustainability is defined by 20 years of work experience on interpretation and adaptation to environmental change in rural societies in Southeast Asia and especially Indonesia. Recently, he started to work on rural Europe as well.
About Gerben Nooteboom
Gerben Nooteboom (Apeldoorn, 1970) studied Rural Sociology and Development Studies and followed minors in Environmental Sociology and the Anthropology in Law. He graduated at the Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR) in 1995. After obtaining his master’s degree, he continued his academic career at Radboud University to carry out his doctoral research. He defended his PhD thesis “A Matter of Style: Social Security and Livelihood in Upland East Java” on the social inequality and self-organised social welfare in rural East Java, Indonesia, and completed his PhD in 2003.
During and after his PhD, Gerben Nooteboom worked as junior teacher and as a KNAW postdoc (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) at Radboud University. In 2006, Nooteboom moved to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), where he was appointed associate professor in 2016. From 2023 onwards, he is director of the UvA Graduate School of Social Science (GSSS) and a member of the UvA Interdisciplinary Centre for Sustainable Development Studies (CSDS) at the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
In his career, Nooteboom has also been recognised for his work on numerous projects and courses. In 2010, he received the award for Departmental Best Teacher (in Anthropology) and was shortlisted for the Best University of Amsterdam Teacher of the Year award in 2019.