Jeltsje Sanne Kemerink-Seyoum is an interdisciplinary scholar who engages with critical theory to understand how injustices become manifest and how they can be challenged in and around water and agriculture.
Currently Jeltsje is particularly interested in understanding what water infrastructure is and does within socionatural relations in general, and processes of agrarian change in particular. For this purpose she studies in detail the everyday practices of engineers, operators and irrigators who engage with various forms of (surface and groundwater) irrigation systems to shed light on how the form and materiality of water infrastructure opens up space to renegotiate social relations of power. In her work, Jeltsje explicitly questions structures and hierarchies that are often assumed or presented as self-evident, in particular those based on gender, race and class.
In addition, Jeltsje is engaged in research that critically examines the implications of shifts in government policies on smallholder farming related to – amongst others - IWRM, land tenure, climate financing, and the covid19 pandemic. In this research, she aims to give especially voice to historically marginalized groups in society and study how rural communities are affected by, but also importantly renegotiated and rearrange, these policy interventions.
Besides her research activities, Jeltsje coordinates the third phase of the Water and Development Partnership Programme, the programmatic collaboration between the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and IHE Delft. As such, she steers the strategic directions of the programme, which aims to stimulate transformations to more socially inclusive and ecological sustainable societies through joint research and education with organizations in low- and middle-income countries. Moreover, she is – and has been – involved in several large-scale collaborative research projects and capacity strengthening initiatives in various African and Asian countries. Noteworthy is the ongoing transformations to groundwater sustainability (T2GS) project in which she works on case studies in Zimbabwe, India and Tanzania.
As lecturer Jeltsje has experience in delivering courses on various subjects including water governance, participation, gender, institutional analysis, and research methodology for qualitative social sciences. Jeltsje actively supervises MSc and PhD students in their thesis research on water governance related case studies.
In addition to her position at IHE Delft, Jeltsje is a visiting researcher at the Global and Inclusive Development Group at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research of the University of Amsterdam and she has been appointed as an affiliated faculty member of the Oregon State University in the United States of America. Since 2018 she is also the Subject Editor on water governance for the peer-reviewed journal Water SA.
Publications
A complete list of publications can be found in Google Scholar.