Arvid van Dam is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn. Under the working title 'Infrastructures of Infection', his research combines insights from infrastructure and multi-species studies, in order to investigate pathways of (arbo)virus transmission. Asking how infrastructures associated with the spread and containment of viruses (including roads, wildlife corridors, and veterinary fences) reflect and channel existing tensions between nature conservation and farming, the cross-disciplinary study project aims to shed light on what futures these discourses and infrastructures portray, promise, or foreclose for rural Africa. Positioned at the crossroads of environmental anthropology and the environmental humanities, his Marie Sklodowska-Curie-funded doctoral research at the University of Leeds explored the making and unmaking of landscape in the arid southeast of Spain. Critically examining processes of modernisation, he argued for a perspective that is attentive to the entanglement of progress and decay. As part of this, Arvid has been a visiting doctoral fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. In previous research, he studied Tsunami recovery in Sri Lanka. Arvid holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from Utrecht University.
