Biographical Note

With a background in Theology and Religious Studies, Linde is interested in the ways in which different truths about the world interact and construct common or conflicting realities.
During her Master’s degree, she studied religiously-inflected conflicts at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). Her Master’s thesis looked at how Judaism is being reimagined through speeches delivered by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. After graduating, she worked for an EU institution as part of the Dutch delegation. She then returned to academia and worked as a research and teaching assistant alongside Professor of Religion and Politics Erin Wilson at the University of Groningen.

Linde moved from The Netherlands to Australia with her partner Victor in 2022 to pursue her PhD. They are making the most of their time in Queensland by visiting as many National Parks as they can with their VW campervan.
Linde is passionate about contributing to just and sustainable futures through her work. She approaches this through questioning and critiquing the underlying assumptions about the world on which policy and science are built.

Research topic

Ontological Imaginaries and Realities of Climate Change in the Great Barrier Reef

Research outline

Climate change is a global phenomenon that is multiple ‘things’ at the same time. In order to better understand and respond to climate change in its multiplicity, dominant discourses on climate change need to be complemented with local, context-specific experiences. This project provides an exploration of different realities of climate change in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). The focus is on what changes local Indigenous people experience and how such experiences interact with dominant discourses on climate change in the GBR. The different realities that are shaped by experiences and discourses are studied in the context of people’s ontological imaginaries. Ontological imaginaries describe how people position themselves in relation to their more-than-human environments. This project consists of a case study involving ethnographic engagement with an Indigenous community in Far North Queensland, Australia. In addition, dominant discourses on climate change in the GBR as articulated through (semi-)governmental organizations such as the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) and the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water are analyzed using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis. Whereas both Indigenous and dominant realities of climate change are researched, the goal of this project is not to compare them to reveal which one is better or more real. Comparisons like those still enforce ontological and epistemological hierarchies. Instead, this project understands multiple realities to co-exist and aims to contribute to discourses of climate change that are more inclusive to the multiple realities of climate change that exist. By centralizing Indigenous experiences and knowledges of climate change, this research humbly contributes to decolonizing climate change discourses and policies. However, we recognize our curbed influence on processes of decolonization, formed by, amongst others, non-Indigenous researchers and limited available resources.

Supervisory team

A/Prof Scott Heron (JCU), Prof Stewart Lockie (The Cairns Institute), Prof Erin Wilson (University of Groningen), Dr Sean Desjardins (University of Groningen)

Research Grants

James Cook University Postgraduate Research Scholarship (JCUPRS), University of Groningen PhD Scholarship

Publications

Draaisma, L.R. and Wilson, E.K., 2021. Secularism. In The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Politics and Ideology (pp. 23-36). Routledge.