Background and experience
04/2020-… Associate Professor at the Department of Nutrition and Public Health, University of Agder, Norway
01/2019-03/2020 Assistant Professor at the Department of Global Development and Planning, University of Agder, Norway
09/2018-02/2019 Sensory research consultant at Haystack, Belgium
11/2017-03/2018 Consultant as an intern at the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food, Norway
12/2013-06/2017 Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo as part of the ERCfunded project «Overheating: The Three Crises of Globalization», headed by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Norway
04/2013-10/2013 Administrator at Center Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
01/2008-08/2013 Joint PhD with the respective double degree in Interdisciplinary Studies at the VUB, and Comparative Science of Cultures at Ghent University, Obtained with greatest distinction awarded unanimously by all members of the jury, Belgium
Areas of responsibility
I am a self-identifying socio-cultural anthropologist with a radical interdisciplinary orientation, focusing on developing an integrative approach to food systems, considering the life lines of food from seed to stool as well as their microbiosocial contexts.I am currently leading the EATWELL project (https://www.eatwell-bhutan.net/) which integrates socio-cultural anthropology of food and food systems with nutrition and gut microbiome studies. I have obtained my joint PhD in Comparative Science of Cultures and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University and have had altogether two years of research stays at the School of Oriental and African Studies, The University of Chicago and Columbia University.
Teaching
I am currently the course coordinator of the Faculty's PhD course in the Philosophy of Science and have been teaching Bachelor courses on qualitative methods, food and society as well as food, globalization, and sustainability.
Research
I am researching how society translates itself into the gut via food and nutrition. More specifically, I examine the ways in which socio-cultural, cosmological, political-economic and (microbiological) environments shape the cultivation, herding, foraging, trading, and sharing of food as well as its processing, preparing, eating and digesting through the integration of socio-anthropological, nutritional and microbiomic approaches and methods. In the EATWELL project do so together with 16 other scientific collaborators, including both Bhutanese, Norwegian and Belgian scholars specialized in socio-cultural anthropology, global nutrition, nutrition, and gut microbiome sciences, as well as several research assistants. I have initiated similar collaborations in Sri Lanka and aim to further develop existing collaborations in DRCongo and Ecuador along similar lines, with the one in Ecuador also involving epigenetics. In this way, I am un-disciplining the anthropology of food systems, food, nutrition and gut microbiology into a radical interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary direction.
Academic interests
Anthropology
Anthropology of food
Anthropology of nutrition
Human and environmental Microbiomes
Epigenetics
radical inter/transdisciplinarity
Method
Philosophy
Selected publications
Van Daele, W. Entangled Assemblages. Found Sci (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-022-09858-w
Van Daele, W. Food as the Holographic Condensation of Life in Sri Lankan Rituals, Ethnos (2018), 83:4, 645-664, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2017.1314309
Van Daele, W. Vibrantly Entangled in Sri Lanka: Food as the Polyrhythmic and Polyphonic Assemblage of Life. Found Sci (2018), 23, 85–102, DOI: 10.1007/s10699-016- 9509-4