Mirja Schoderer
Mirja Schoderer is a transdisciplinary researcher with expertise in environmental justice, political ecology, water, mining and conservation. She is an assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she explores the uneven green transition, focusing on the extraction of critical raw materials and on how frontline communities experience and conceptualize extraction that takes place under the green transition paradigm. Her research centers lived experiences and creative methods and explores options to integrate plural knowledges and ontologies into public decision-making, for which she also applies context-sensitive synthesis methods. With a background in literature studies and environmental politics and management, Mirja’s work always comes back to how the material and the symbolic are interlinked, exploring, i.a., how imaginaries and discourses manifest in institutions and practices, and how these, in turn, consolidate or challenge imaginaries. Her PhD research on mining and water governance in Mongolia exemplifies this, but so does her more recent work on nature conservation in Colombia.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Mongolia