Introducing: Maud Rijks
Maud Rijks recently joined the Institute for History as a PhD candidate within the starting grant project "You say security, I say crisis – Challenging Disciplinary Boundaries in Security Cooperation and Crisis Governance" under the supervision of Dario Fazzi. Below she introduces herself.
Hello colleagues!
If you had told me two years ago today that I would now be introducing myself as a PhD candidate at the Institute for History, I wouldn't have believed it. Back then, I hadn't started my Research MA in Leiden yet, was new to the study of history, and had no idea what 'doing a PhD' even entailed. I suppose it is a testament to the (indoctrinating) qualities of Leiden's teachers that I have reached this point.
My path to becoming a PhD candidate has taken some unexpected turns. After growing up in the Middle East and Asia, I knew my interests lay beyond the borders of the country my parents are from, but I wasn't quite sure how this would take form in terms of my career. After graduating high school, I travelled to Jordan to learn Arabic for a few months. This inspired me to follow a BA program in International Relations at the University of Groningen (also abroad, in a way), where I hoped to pursue my interest in the Middle East and the Arabic language. When the COVID-pandemic hit, my plans to do an exchange semester in Morocco fell through. I turned my interests towards the political dynamics of identity in the Netherlands and wrote my BA thesis about Dutch perceptions of immigrants from the Middle East. While writing, I struggled to conform to the methodological requirements of an IR thesis, and realized I needed to do some re-evaluating about the kind of studies that suited me.
I took the advantage of COVID restrictions lifting to take a break from academics and travel. Ashamed as I am about my carbon footprint that year, I was inspired and liberated by my experiences of working on farms and roadtripping in the US and Canada, walking the Camino in Spain, and hiking in Nepal. Somewhere along the way I decided to take a step back and consider the things that interested me; I vaguely remembered enjoying the subject of history in high school, and I liked the idea of having two years to decide what I might want to do with my life afterwards — which is how I landed in the Research MA PCNI in Leiden. Little did I know that I would fall headfirst into a discipline that suited my academic and personal interests so completely. By the end of my master's, I seemed to have found my niche, combining my passion for environmental issues, North American politics and culture, and historical research in a thesis about antitoxics activism in the Great Lakes region in the 1980s.
I am now lucky enough to be able to continue the work of my master's thesis in the form of a PhD. My project explores the origins, developments, and legacies of the international organization Greenpeace’s decision to launch a campaign against toxic pollution in the Great Lakes basin in the late 1980s. The project employs the concepts of translocal activism and environmental justice to look at how activists engaged with science, publicity, and politics to create awareness of and political resistance against toxic contamination in this region.
If you would like to chat, exchange ideas, or just meet for a coffee, please let me know — my proverbial door (inbox) is always open!