Dr Elizabeth Vander Meer is a Teaching Fellow in Interdisciplinary Data Methods at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She also co-organises the Regenerating Place Masters intensive course, taught through Edinburgh College of Art (ECA). She obtained a PhD in multispecies anthropology from the University of Exeter in 2024. Her project involved multispecies ethnography of captivity for penguins, sea lions and lions in French circuses and in rescue contexts, which included investigating the bond and relationships between exotic animal trainers as well as rescue staff and these animals. Along with ethnography, Elizabeth used visual and discourse analysis to understand narratives of circus shows and the place of exotic animals in French law. She drew from performance studies, phenomenology and biopolitics to explore animal resistance to captivity while also taking a feminist intersectional approach that considered the vulnerability of women animal trainers alongside the vulnerability of captive animals. A secondment role in 2023-24 gave Elizabeth opportunity to gain experience in supporting European and international research networks on food systems and climate change at Wageningen University & Research, with focus on research communication and dissemination. The second part of the secondment involved postdoctoral research for a Wellcome Trust One Health archival project; Elizabeth undertook research and researcher engagement to explore three newly catalogued archival collections at the University of Edinburgh for the Dick Vet, Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and OneKind animal charity.
Research Interests
Elizabeth’s current research interests include One Health and One Welfare, considering feminist (or ecofeminist) care approaches that decentre the human, and the cultural dimensions of both development and implementation of these concepts. She also continues to be interested in cultural and ethical dimensions of wildlife trade and human wildlife conflict and coexistence, specifically with animals considered introduced ‘alien invasives’, big predators, and wild animals that are seen to spread zoonotic diseases. She tends to approach multispecies anthropological research through the lenses of phenomenology and biopolitics. After years working in sustainability as a research and policy manager for the University of Edinburgh prior to an academic position, Elizabeth maintains research interests in sustainability, specifically climate resilience and biodiversity; her first PhD was in environmental policy and ethics with focus on biodiversity conservation in Latin America, considered through a feminist political ecology perspective. She is interested currently in how green infrastructure mapping and visualisation and species identification tools can support protection of green spaces while also supporting communities (in the UK) to better understand and engage with local nature.