Dr Ivo Syndicus

I am a qualitative social scientist interested in how land use and agricultural production systems intersect with broader processes of social change.

This interest has initially taken me to places considered particularly challenging for agricultural production, from the dry and hot interior South Indian plains of Pudukkottai to the altitudes of the Eastern Cordillera in the Bolivian Andes and the rugged terrain of the central Papua New Guinea Highlands in Simbu. What started with immersive participant observation became increasingly ethnographic and eventually anthropological. The importance of cash crops and livestock to fund the desire for educational achievements in Papua New Guinea then led me to study students’ experiences in higher education and relations to their rural kin and sponsors.

Most recently, my work focuses on diseases in intensive poultry production. I was involved in two related interdisciplinary research programmes during five years as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Sciences at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London. The first was the GCRF One Health Poultry Hub, for which I co-designed, coordinated or otherwise contributed to a series of studies concerned with the relation between intensifying chicken production and zoonotic diseases in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Viet Nam. I then was a Researcher Co-Investigator on the FluMap and subsequent FluTrailMap consortia that brought together leading UK scientists to better understand the threat of avian influenza to poultry in Britain and its mitigation, for example through biosecurity.

One specific area of interest sharpened through different research processes is the understanding of agricultural supply chains, how these become reconfigured in articulation with broader global and local dynamics and strategies of value extraction from them, and how they shape – and are shaped by – relations between different supply chain actors.

Another area of sustained interest is interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research – both as approaches to research and as subject of observation and inquiry.

I hold a PhD in Anthropology from Maynooth University, a Master’s in Rural Development & Natural Resource Management from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and a primary degree in Agriculture Ecology from the University of Rostock.

I joined the School of Geography and the Environment as Postdoctoral Research Associate as part of the European Research Council Advanced Grant on Bio-Social Security: Social Science Transformations of Biosecurity (BIOSSCI), led by Professor Stephen Hinchliffe. As part of this project, I will continue to build on my work relating to poultry and avian influenza in the UK to empirically document and theorize how animals are kept healthy.