Verena Sandner Le Gall

As a human geographer and postdoctoral lecturer/researcher at the Department of Geography/Kiel, I have been teaching Political Ecology and Environmental Justice classes as my favourites for more than 10 years.  In my PhD-project, I studied the transformation of traditional marine resource use in Indigenous communities in Nicaragua/Panama, focusing on changing institutions and local knowledges embedded in spiritual worldviews, and on local perceptions of environmental change such as sea-level rise. The communities are entangled in struggles with powerful economic actors and interest groups on different levels of scales, as well as in struggles for recognition and territorial autonomy. In this context, the creation of neo-traditional institutions for resource use and the local discourses on the unity of human-nature relations embedded in wider discourses on Indigeneity have been fascinating. In other small projects I have worked on migration and exclusion of Romanian Roma in Germany/France and on a protest movement against a large gold-mining project in Romania. I have begun to participate in the Enjust network during the time of its founding in 2018.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Latin America/Caribbean, France, Romania, Germany