Jenny-Louise Van Der Aa
linguistic anthropology; religion and migration; life stories, social work, and poverty; ethnographic monitoring; narrative structures; Dell Hymes; Jan Blommaert
Jenny-Louise Van der Aa is a researcher and teacher whose primary research focuses on the epistemology of poverty in Belgium, The Netherlands and the Caribbean. Refugees' shopping and cooking habits, on-the-street alcoholism and (online) sex work adverts are core foci in this respect. Central to her work is 'ethograpic monitoring' (Hymes 1980), a complex methodology to involve and feed back with field respondents,
She teaches and supervises MA and PhD students on both on- and offline aspects of narrative, performance and the self.
She was also the 2011-2012 Daytal L.. Kendall Library Fellow at the American Philosophical Society, researching the oeuvre of the Dell Hymes.