Mandy Geise is a postdoctoral researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS). As an anthropologist of health and the environment, she works on social aspects of environmental degradation, health, care, technology and citizen initiatives. She uses ethnographic and collaborative methods to explore how people make sense of, use and (re)shape technologies to measure and address local manifestations of the socioecological crisis, with the aim to stimulate just, participatory and collaborative environmental governance.

Dr Geise gained her PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Cermes3 in Paris and has a MSc in Medical Anthropology and Sociology from the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD research, part of the ERC Globhealth project, was concerned with medical genetics and genomics in Mexico. Tracing the use of genetic technologies and framing of chronic disease, it looked at how diabetes is entangled in narratives about genetic composition, racial admixture, and disease etiology, and how socio-environmental factors such as diet and inequality are explained by medical specialists, researchers, policy makers and the larger public.

Before joining ISS, she worked in multidisciplinary teams at the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research (Nivel) and Amsterdam Institute for Global Health Research (AIGHD) at the intersections of anthropology, health and the environment.

Among others, she has worked on antimicrobial resistance, issues of inequality and stigmatization, emergency and disaster management, the social ecology of food and health, the use of technologies in medicine and public health, and on strengthening the contribution of the social sciences to the prevention and response to infectious disease threats.

Current research

At ISS Dr Geise is the postdoctoral researcher of the 2023-2025 cycle of the Prince Claus Chair for Equity and Development, led by Dr Sebastián Ureta. This cycle of the chair focuses on Technology and Citizen Technoscience, Connecting Local Environments with the Ecological Crisis. The project explores, analyses, and aims to disrupt the barriers facing the mobilization of citizen technoscience for the participative assessment and/or remediation of environmental degradation in the global south.

These questions will be explored through a mixture of ethnographic and action-research methods, aiming at producing publications and public outreach initiatives.