Gertjan Plets is a cultural anthropologist based at Utrecht University (Netherlands) specialised in energy infrastructure and indigenous Siberian politics. He has been working in the Altai Republic since 2009 where he has been tracing the impact of Gazprom’s corporate social responsibility programs on local politics and cultural dynamics. Before his tenure at Utrecht Gertjan was based at Stanford University where he contributed to a research lab exploring the role of cultural heritage in global politics.
His new project “The Poetics and Sociality of Digital Heritage Infrastructures” explores how digital repositories and databases shape current understandings of the past and play a role in shaping identities and political hierarchies.