Profiles of members

  • A.R. Siders

    Assistant professor in public policy and geography
  • Almut Schilling-Vacaflor

    Postdoc, University of Osnabrück

  • Ana Lucía Maya-Aguirre

    Lawyer Marine and Coastal Governance, Colombia

  • Antje Bruns

    Professor for Governance and Sustainability, Trier University

  • Arianna Porrone

    PhD student in Global Studies, University of Macerata, Italy

  • Armando Hernández de la Cruz

    Sociologist, Gender Studies, Mexico

  • Barbara Dombrowski

    Dipl. Photographer, visual artist, Hamburg

  • Benedikt Schmid

    University of Freiburg, Institute for Environmental Social Science and Geography

  • Celia Ruiz de Oña Plaza

    Political Ecologist, Journalist, Traveler and Dancer with the Mountains

  • Daniel Bendix

    School of Social Sciences, Friedensau Adventist University

  • Dennis Schüpf

    PhD Researcher; Humangeography; Bonn

  • Diego Silva Garzón

    Economist/Anthropologist, Geneva, Switzerland

  • Dinah Ipsen

    Environmental management, Kiel

  • Eirini Skrimizea

    Human-Environment Geography, Leuven

  • Eleanor Chapman

    Architect and research associate/socially just urban planning and development, Munich

  • Elena Zepharovich

    Centre for Development and Environment, University of Bern, Switzerland

  • Francesca Rosignoli

    Postdoctoral researcher

  • Gül Özerol

    Socio-environmental scientist, The Hague, The Netherlands

  • Hali Healy

    Senior Lecturer, University of Johannesburg

  • Hauke Dentzin

    Geograph, Kiel

  • Irmak Ertör

    Bogazici University (Istanbul), The Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History

A.R. Siders

Assistant professor in public policy and geography at the University of Delaware and core faculty in the Disaster Research Center. Her research focuses on climate change adaptation decision-making, evaluation, and equity. Recent projects have explored managed retreat and relocation as coastal adaptation strategies and the social justice implications of adaptation and disaster risk reduction allocations. She is a lawyer and social scientist with interdisciplinary training.

Link

Contact

Almut Schilling-Vacaflor

Almut Schilling‐Vacaflor, PhD, currently works as a Postdoc at Osnabrück University and co-leads two research projects about soy and beef supply chains from Brazil, with a focus on regulatory governance, corporate accountability and environmental justice. Prominent themes in her research are business and human rights, environmental governance, global supply chains, Indigenous peoples and FPIC, extractive industries and the agribusiness in Latin America.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Brazil, Bolivia, Andean region, Latin America, Europe

Link

Contact

Keywords: Political Ecology, Socio-Ecological Transformation

Ana Lucía Maya-Aguirre

Director and Co-founder of the Observatory for Marine and Coastal Governance (Colombia). Member of the Marine Working Group of the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW). Member of the Latin American Hub of the Virtual Blue Decade. More than 14 years of experience working on: coastal law, international environmental law, comparative law, environmental migrations, human rights, environmental governance, sustainable development goals, climate change, and capacity building for indigenous people’s and Afro-descendants’ rights. Lecturer in environmental law and environmental governance, and academic advisor of degree projects. Lawyer and specialist in Constitutional Law graduated from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She earned an LLM in Energy and Environment at Tulane University with the support of the the J. William Fulbright Scholarship.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Colombia / Latin America, Marine and coastal governance

Link

Contact

Antje Bruns

Antje Bruns is a professor for Sustainable Development and Governance in the Human Geography Department at Trier University. Her work examines socio-political geographies of resources and the role of politics, power and expertise in environmental governance.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Germany, Greater Region (Saar-Lor-Lux), Coastal Cities; West-Africa

Link

Contact

Keywords: Climate Change Adaptation, Climate Politics, Degrowth, Inter-and Transdisciplinary Research Methods, Political Ecology, Postcolonialism, Science and Technology Studies, Socio-Ecological Transformation, Urban and Regional Planning

Arianna Porrone

Arianna Porrone is a PhD student in Global Studies. Justice, Rights, Politics, at the Department of political science, communication and international relations of the University of Macerata, Italy. Awarded with a One-Year Research Grant for Doctoral Candidates (2020-2021) she has joined the research group Social Dynamics in Coastal and Marine Areas of Kiel University as a visiting researcher. Her main research interests are political ecology, environmental justice, storytelling and the environmental humanities as well ecofeminisms and feminist critical theories. Her Ph.D research focuses on understanding power and gender dynamics in knowledge creation within the current international environmental governance realm and aims at exploring ontological pluralism as a way forward able to reconcile human and more-than-human concerns.

Link

Contact

Keywords: Political Ecology, Gender and Development, Postcolonialism, Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research Methods

Armando Hernández de la Cruz

Professor of society and environment at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur. Member of the Academic Group of Gender Studies. Her current research in the Gulf Coast focuses on gender relations in fishermen’s households. Further research focuses on the cultural and social consequences of oil infrastructure development in the Gulf of Mexico, using theory from political ecology.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Gulf of Mexico, southeastern Mexico

Link

Contact

Keywords: Climate Change Adaptation, Gender and Development, Political Ecology, Postcolonialism, Socio-Ecological Transformation

Barbara Dombrowski

For the last 10 years Barbara Dombrowski dedicated her work to places affected by climate change. She focused on five relevant and specific climate localities on every continent and their indigenous population: Achuar in Ecuador, Inuit in East Greenland, mongolian Nomads in Desert Gobi, Maasai in the Republic of Tansania and Micronesians in Kiribati. Man-made climate change is not only a massive threat to nature, ecosystems and biodiversity, but above all, to people themselves. This is the main theme of the project. After portraying the peoples and landscapes, Barbara brought their pictures in spectacular photo-art-installations in the Amazonia, Greenland and in and around the Hambach Forest, on the apron of the open-cast lignite mine, together. By combining the people, Barbara builds a bridge between them, their regions and cultures and shows that everything is interwoven.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: worldwide, now mostly focused on Europe

Contact

Link

Tropic Ice_Dialog

Keywords: Climate Change Adaptation, Climate Politics, Postcolonialism, Socio-Ecological Transformation

Benedikt Schmid

Broadly speaking my research engages with the question how societal trajectories can be shifted away from current patterns of unsustainability towards social and environmental justice. Within the complex and divergent processes of global change, I take a particular interest in community initiatives and social enterprises working towards alternative economies. My primary empirical focus, thereby, is on localized productive infrastructures and the concomitant practices of tinkering, making and repair in the Global North. Conceptually, I draw on practice-theoretical scholarship allowing for the consideration of both the performativity and materiality of social relations. Taking a participatory and transdisciplinary approach, my research aims to develop strategies and build coalitions with and between a variety of actors and participants.

Website

Link

Contact

Celia Ruiz de Oña Plaza

Researcher at the Multidisciplinary Research Centre on Chiapas and the Southern Border -CIMSUR- at the National Mexican Autonomous University -UNAM-. Her current research in the transborder region between Chiapas and Guatemala focuses on climate change adaptation, rural sustainable production systems and borderland issues. She integrates political ecology and borderland studies into the field of climate change adaptation. Further research focuses on the migration and climate change nexus at the Mexican southern border. Celia Ruiz de Oña´s main research areas are in Chiapas-Guatemala borderland regions. She has been collaborating with ENJUST members since 2018.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Latin American region. Transboundary area between Chiapas-Guatemala

Link

Contact

Contact UNAM

Keywords: Agroecology, Climate Change Adaptation, Inter-and Transdisciplinary Research Methods, Migration, Political Ecology, Science and Technology Studies, Socio-Ecological Transformation, Urban and Regional Planning

Daniel Bendix

Daniel Bendix is Professor for Global Development at Friedensau Adventist University, Germany. His research focuses on colonial power in development policy, the politics of reproductive health and population, postcolonial critique of development in the North and transnational activism against land grabbing. He is a member of the transnational network Afrique-Europe-Interact and of glokal, a Berlin-based association for postcolonial education, and was active in the group ‘kassel postkolonial’.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Germany, Mali, Tanzania

Link

afrique-europe-interact

connecting the dots

mangoes & bullets

glokal e.V.

Contact

Keywords: Postcolonialism, Social-Ecological Transformation

Dennis Schüpf

Doctoral Student (Uni Bonn, L. Schipper supervision) at IDOS (German Institute of Development & Sustainability) in the Environmental Governance program within the Klimalog research project. My current research in the coastal region of South India (Tamil Nadu) focuses on coastal adaptation policies/measures in the context of contested sand resources. Applying a political ecology lens, I aim to investigate climate change adaptation regimes within wider socio-political processes that ultimately (re)define who has access over (sand) resources. Further, I am interested in using documentary photography as a means to visually explore contested land- and seascapes where environmental justice concerns are prevalent. 

Country/Region of interest/research focus: India, South Asia, Coastal Areas

Link

Contact

Keywords: Climate Change Adaptation, Indigenous Environmental Justice, Political Ecology

Diego Silva Garzón

Diego Silva is an economist/anthropologist and works as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre of International Environmental Studies (CIES) at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), in Geneva. His work is located at the intersection of science and technology studies, environmental and economic anthropology, and agrarian studies. His current research agenda includes: 1) the socio-technical analysis of seed commodity networks and the rural conflicts surrounding the deployment of agricultural innovations in Latin America (FNS Postdoc project); 2) the anthropological study of climate change mitigation in agriculture through the emergent knowledge and practices of environmental accounting (PI: prof. Shaila Seshia Galvin); and 3) the political ecology of the EU energy transition with a focus on the lithium battery production chain, linking Latin American suppliers of lithium minerals with the European lithium battery industry (co-coordinator for the project led by prof. Marc Hufty).

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Latin America, Colombia and Argentina

Contact

Link

Keywords: Climate Change Adaptation, Climate Politics, Ecological Economics, Inter-and Transdisciplinary Research Methods, Political Ecology, Postcolonialism, Science and Technology Studies

Dinah Ipsen

Aspiring environmental researcher/consultant with an inclination in the domain of socio-environmental conflicts and local approaches to sustainability. With an engineering degree in natural resources management and studies in cultural development and sustainable tourism, I have gained professional experience in the field of sustainable community development in south Central America.
Currently, I am studying a master in environmental management and working as an research assistant in the field of political geography in Kiel, Germany.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Latin America

Contact

Keywords: Agroecology, Climate Change Adaptation, Climate Politics, Degrowth, Energy Justice, Food Justice, Indigenous Environmental Justice, Indigenous and Local Communities, Inter-and Transdisciplinary Research Methods, Political Ecology, Postcolonialism, Public Health, Socio-Ecological Transformation, Water Justice
 

Eirini Skrimizea

Post-doctoral researcher at KU Leuven and teaching associate at the Master program in Sustainable Development of the same University. Her current research focuses on community forests and historical commons, socially-differentiated vulnerabilities and female cooperatives, in the context of the argan oil boom and climate change. Further research focuses on sustainable agriculture and water governance from a climate change-(sustainable) development nexus perspective. She mobilizes human-environment geography approaches to integrate social sciences theories with concepts from social-ecological systems and climate change research. She participates in research projects that are usually characterized by interdisciplinary questions and transdisciplinary ambitions for participatory research and planning in the field. Eirini Skrimizea’s case studies are located mainly in Europe, Africa and Asia.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Greece, France, Morocco, Central Asia

Link

Contact

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

Eleanor Chapman

Researcher, project manager and architect with an MSc in Land Management and Land Tenure and 13+ years experience in the private and not-for-profit sectors, as a committed advocate for socially justice and sustainable urban development. Her research interests centre on the promotion and defence of the commons, the role of design as an agent of change, housing as a public good (not a commodity), and the socially just distribution of environmental goods and burdens. She is currently researching the integration of environmental justice concerns into the local planning, development and governance of urban green space. In her previous role at a global network of local governments, Eleanor was responsible for steering effective collaborations between researchers and municipal staff working for European cities, with a focus on climate adaptation and building resilient communities.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Europe, in particular Germany

Link

Contact

Keywords: Climate Change Adaptation, Climate Politics, Degrowth, Gender and Development, Political Ecology, Socio-Ecological Transformation, Urban and Regional Planning

Elena Zepharovich

Elena Zepharovich is a researcher at the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Bern. She finished her PhD at University of Bern at the Institute of Geography. Before joining the CDE, she was working at Vienna University of Economics (WU) in the Department of Ecological Economics in the field of Education for Sustainable Development. Her current research focus lies on inequality, environmental justice, and deforestation in the Argentinean Chaco.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Argentinia

Link

Contact / Contact

Francesca Rosignoli

Dr. Francesca Rosignoli (PhD 2016) is postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Public Law at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain), member of the CEDAT and coordinator of EJ-ITALY, the first research group made up of women only focusing on Environmental Justice (EJ) in Italy. Her research interests include environmental justice, global environmental governance, climate change, climate-induced migration, and collective capabilities. Her current research focuses on the role of gender and justice in climate-induced migration. Her latest monograph, Environmental Justice for Climate Refugees, was published by Routledge in May 2022. She is co-editor of the volumes ‘Climate Change Integration in the Multilevel Governance of Italy and Austria’ (Brill 2022) and ‘Racism, Environment, Health. Environmental Racism and Health Inequalities’ (PM 2022).

Links

Environmental Research in the Human Science area

Environmental Justice Institute

Linkedin

Contact / Contact

Gül Özerol

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

Link

Contact

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

Hali Healy

Hali Healy has co-authored and co-ordinated work on two EC funded projects on sustainable development. One of these was EJOLT (Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade, 2011-2014), a project that linked researchers from the sustainability sciences and environmental justice organisations (EJOs). On the basis of this work Hali has published several peer-reviewed articles, and co-edited a book, Ecological Economics from the Ground Up (Routledge, 2013). In 2016 Hali moved to South Africa to take up lecturing post at the University of Johannesburg in the department of Anthropology and Development studies. Since then, much of her research has focused on environmental injustice, post and decoloniality, commons resource management and the greening of the South African economy.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: South Africa, Global South, Europe

Contact

Keywords: Climate Politics, Degrowth, Ecological Economics, Inter-and Transdisciplinary Research Methods, Political Ecology, Postcolonialism, Science and Technology Studies

Hauke Dentzin

Master Student at Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, in the programme Sustainability, Society, and the Environment. As a research assistant in the Urban- and Population Geography working group of the CAU his focus is set on processes of green gentrification, energetic retrofitting and energy justice in Kiel. Furthermore, his master thesis will be based on the topic of financialization of the social housing market and the resulting urban development in Sao Paulo. Finally, he is interested in science communication and science’s role in social society. Overall, the urban realm is at the center of his studies, researching about the influence of capitalistic patterns of urban development and ruptures in this overarching trend.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Brazil, Sao Paulo, Kiel

Contact

Keywords: Energy Vulnerability, Political Ecology, Postcolonialism, Socio-Ecological Transformation, Urban and Regional Planning

Irmak Ertör

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

Links:

Political Ecology blog (of the former ENTITLE group)

Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History 

Contact

Loading...