Manuel Wagner works at the urban, multifunctional agriculture Annalinde in Leipzig as an educationer for urban gardening and socio-ecological transformation. He studied at the University of Münster and worked at the StadtLabor of the Geo-Science department at the intersection of science, art and activism.

His research focuses on human-compost relations and ethics of care. For this he refers to thematic fields like feminist political ecology, more-than-human geography, new materialisms, care-relations or the speculative fabulation. What can humans learn from compost? How can we think society from the rotting? How can conscious human-soil or human-compost care-relations be conceived and created?

Country/Region of interest/research focus: human-compost-relations, ethics of care

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Irmak Ertör is an assistant professor in the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History, Bogazici University, Istanbul. Before her current position, she was working in the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) as a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC-funded ENVJUSTICE project focusing on global fisheries conflicts and environmental justice. She holds a BS in Economics and an MA in Modern Turkish History from Bogazici University, Turkey. She has been a Marie Curie (ITN) early stage researcher of the ENTITLE project (European Network of Political Ecology) and completed her PhD on the “Political Ecology of Marine Finfish Aquaculture in Europe” in ICTA, UAB. Currently, she is a member of the Cost Action on Ocean Governance and investigates socio-environmental conflicts and social movements of fisher communities, food sovereignty and environmental justice.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Turkey and Mediterranean

Political Ecology blog (of the former ENTITLE group)

Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History 

Gül Özerol is an assistant professor at the Department of Governance and Technology (CSTM), University of Twente. She is a social-environmental scientist, specializing in public policy and focusing on water, energy and climate change. Her current research focuses on water governance, energy transition and climate resilience in diverse political, social and ecological contexts of the North Sea Region and the Middle East. In her research she integrates actor-based and institutional approaches to public policy and natural resource governance. She applies comparative and transdisciplinary methods that go beyond advancing theories and co-create knowledge in collaboration with academic and non-academic stakeholders.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Europe, Middle East, North Africa

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Keywords: Climate Change Adaptation, Climate Politics, Degrowth, Energy Justice, Gender and Development, Inter-and Transdisciplinary Research Methods, Political Ecology, Socio-Ecological Transformation, Urban and Regional Planning

Mirja has an interdisciplinary background in the field of environmental social sciences and a degree in comparative literature. She’s a researcher at the German Development Institute in Bonn where her PhD work focusses on water governance in general and on water and mining conflicts in particular. Mirja is interested in the intersection between institutions and discourses; in the ways in which how we speak and think about natural resources shape how we manage them and vice versa. Further research focusses on knowledge regimes and infrastructures for marine CO₂ observation. Mirja has a keen interest in feminist political ecology, feminist methodologies and intersectional research.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Mongolia

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Experienced professional with a strong background in geophysics and geological sciences, demonstrating analytical skills and technical expertise in geospatial analysis, advanced GIS methodologies, 3-component seismic data processing, and borehole microresistivity image interpretation for improved reservoir evaluation and well positioning.

Currently studying remote sensing at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), focusing on utilizing satellite data to assess environmental challenges, such as air quality after wildfires and dust events. This path reflects a commitment to environmental responsibility and sustainability, combining self-directed learning with formal training to apply remote sensing technologies for enhanced environmental monitoring and support informed decision-making for sustainable practices.

Parallel to a career in geophysics, she is also an accomplished artist. Her work spans abstract and figurative expressionism in painting, with participation in 57 art exhibitions, both domestically and internationally, drawing inspiration from German and Mexican cultures to inform her artistic creations.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Mexico and Germany.

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Anna Lena Bercht is a human geographer and a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography at the University of Kiel. Previously, she was a guest researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) at the Stockholm University and at the Disaster Research Unit (DRU) at the Freie University Berlin. Her research lies at the interface of geography and psychology, with a current focus on psychological barriers, climate adaptation and climate justice based on the example of coastal fisheries. Anna Lena works primarily in the Norwegian Arctic and employs qualitative social research methods. One crucial aim is to better understand cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes in complex human-environment relationships.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Norwegian Arctic

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