Mennatullah Mohamed Hendawy
TU Berlin, Department of Planning Building Environment and Ain Shams University, Urban Planning and Design
Francesca Rosignoli
Postdoctoral researcher
Matthias Süßen
Freelance lecturer for science communication, video coach, blogger & journalist, Kiel
Thomas Thaler
Postdoctoral researcher
Nele Matz-Lück
Professor of Public Law, Kiel
Stefanie Baasch
Geographer and Environmental Psychologist, Bremen
Judith Bopp
Cultural geographer and postdoctoral researcher
Nicole Doerr
Sociologist, Copenhagen
Christian Baatz
Postdoctoral researcher, Kiel
Maria Kaufmann
Radboud University, Department of Geography, Planning and Environment
Riccarda Flemmer
Postdoctoral researcher
Anne Tittor
Sociologist, Jena
Erik van Doorn
International Law Scholar, Kiel
Sven Bergmann
German Maritime Museum, Bremerhaven – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History
Irmak Ertör
Bogazici University (Istanbul), The Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History
Robert Hafner
PhD, Institute of Geography, Innsbruck University, Austria
Jonas Hein
Human Geographer, Kiel
Hartmut Fünfgeld
University of Freiburg, Institute for Environmental Social Science and Geography
Benedikt Schmid
University of Freiburg, Institute for Environmental Social Science and Geography
Anna Lena Bercht
Human geographer and postdoctoral researcher, Kiel
Benno Fladvad
Postdoctoral researcher, Hamburg
Gert Van Hecken
University of Antwerp, Institute of Development Policy
Libertad Chavez-Rodriguez
CIESAS Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social / Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology, Mexico
Florian Dünckmann
Human Geographer, Kiel
Elena Zepharovich
Centre for Development and Environment, University of Bern, Switzerland
Sébastien Boillat
University of Bern, Institute of Geography
Daniel Bendix
School of Social Sciences, Friedensau Adventist University
Sören Weißermel
Postdoctoral researcher, Kiel
Friedrich Neu
Freiburg University, Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources, Institute of Environmental Social Sciences and Geography, Chair of Geography of Global Change
A.R. Siders
Assistant professor in public policy and geography
Johanna Barnbeck
Creative Director
Simon Radtke
Human Geographer, Kiel
Yvonne Kunz
Geographer, Bonn
Stephanie Leder
Affiliation Researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Urban and Rural Development
Silja Klepp
Human Geographer, Kiel
Ulrich Gabriel
Verwaltungsangestellter, Kiel
Mennatullah Mohamed Hendawy
Mennatullah is an urban planner and visual thinker who aims to inspire sustained and empowered urban development through communication towards a just socio-spatial and visual reality. Mennatullah have long been fascinated by the way knowledge, power, and (in)justice are manifested in and co-construct cities and the public sphere. She is currently a visiting scholar at Columbia university, research associate and PhD candidate at The Technical university of Berlin, an associated researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) in Erkner, Germany and an affiliated assistant lecturer at the department of urban planning and design in Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt.
She is moved by the exploration of ‘agency’, ‘justice’ and ‘assumptions’ within socio-spatial everyday encounters. She is interested in how to enable the vulnerable majority and how to develop communities in an integrated manner. She certainly practices urban planning, design and education as approaches to empowerment with an aim to cover the gap in theory building in contested urban contexts. As a multipotentialite interested in intersections, she deals with urban planning as a developmental multidisciplinary field.
She believes in the role of research in driving local development and national policies as well as the importance of transferring knowledge and systems between global north and south through win-win means. As she views learning and research as two-way cyclic processes, the impact she strives for is the growth of all the humans she meets along her journey. In particular, she is interested in experimental methodologies and participatory action research through which she aspires to take values into action by connecting justice and urban planning.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Egypt, Mediatized World
Francesca Rosignoli
Postdoctoral fellow of Political Science at Stockholm University (SU), member of the Environmental Justice Institute (EJI) and coordinator of EJ-ITALY, the first research group made up of women only focusing on Environmental Justice (EJ) in Italy. She is currently engaged in a research project on Environmental Justice and ‘Climate Refugees.’ The main goal is to operationalize EJ to overcoming the legal impasse concerning the lack of recognition of ‘Climate Refugees’ at the international level. She analyzes the topic through a multi-disciplinary lens, including law, philosophy, and political science. In doing so, she bridges a conceptual, legal, ethical, and political analysis of the phenomenon. Further, she is part of a Team project at SU called Environmental research in the human sciences area (cross-faculty activities- Humanities, Law, and Social Sciences – on environmental issues realized by a team of five postdoctoral researchers).
Links
Environmental Research in the Human Science area
Thomas Thaler
I’m currently working as a post-doc researcher at the Institute of Mountain Risk Engineering (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences). My research focuses on the topic of risk governance, social justices and natural hazard risk management in Europe, with a particular emphasis on questions relating to design and effectiveness of governance systems as well as integrated of European environmental policies into national and local institutions.
Nele Matz-Lück
Professor of public law with a focus on public international law including the law of the sea at Kiel University and co-director of the Walther Schücking Institute for International Law. Member of the Cluster of Excellency „Future Ocean“ and, since 2017, one of the co-speakers. Adjunct professorship at Dalhousie University in Halifax and was adjunct professor at the K.G. Jebsen Centre on the Law of the Sea at the Arctic University of Norway (Tromsø) from 2013 to 2018. Member of the Constitutional Court of Schleswig-Holstein. Her main areas of research focus on the law of the sea and international environmental law.
Stefanie Baasch
Researcher at the artec Sustainability Research Center, Universität Bremen. Her current research focuses on the governance of bioenergy and biomass conflicts in the context of the German energy transition. Further research focuses on energy transition, sustainable regional and urban development, environmental governance and participation.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Germany, Europe, Belize, Kenia
Judith Bopp
Judith is a postdoc with the Institute for Spatial Analysis and Planning in Areas of Intensive Agriculture (ISPA) at the University of Vechta. Her study deals with the use of local knowledge in smallholder practices, and sustainable farming approaches such as organic farming, natural farming or agroforestry. She works on how farmers include sustainable farming to stabilise their livelihoods as well as to adapt to climate-related changes of their farm environments. She looks in particular at local knowledge in those farming and climate adaptation approaches. Prior to her postdoc, Judith was engaged in megacity research: Her doctoral project explored the emerging organic food movement in Bangkok, Thailand as a new social movement. She has her regional focus on Thailand, Myanmar and Southern India.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Thailand, Myanmar, Southern India
Latest publication: Local Notions of Alternative Practices: Organic Food Movements in Bangkok, Thailand and Chennai, India
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Nicole Doerr
Associate Professor of Sociology and directing the Copenhagen Centre of Political Mobilisation and Social Movement Studies CoMMonS at the University of Copenhagen. Her current research is on feminist and queer coalitions with migrants in Scandinavia, the US, and Germany, and on the conditions under which middle class white majority people in the Global North engage in acts of solidarity with people affected by drought, floods, and forced displacement. She integrates queer perspectives and critical theories into the fields of social movement studies and democratic theory. Further research focuses on the impact of climate change and forced migration on democratic processes and on the critical discourse historical analysis of far right and right wing populist mobilisation.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, United States, Central Europe
Christian Baatz
Christian Baatz is lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at Kiel University and leads a research project on how to distribute funding provided by the international community to support adaptation to climate change in the Global South. Prior to this, he finished his Ph.D. thesis on compensating climate change victims in developing countries. Having a background in environmental sciences, his work aims at analysing the normative dimension of social and environmental problems that we face today and at discussing that research within inter- and transdisciplinary contexts.
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Maria Kaufmann
Maria is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Governance and Politics at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands (Department of Geography, Planning and Environment). Her current research focuses on governance of climate change adaptation (particularly flood risk governance), nature-based solutions, energy vulnerability and understanding societal transformations (or the lack thereof). She integrates insights from discursive-institutionalism and critical theories into the field of environmental adaptation. Methodologically her focus is on qualitative research methods.
Riccarda Flemmer
She is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Political Science at the University of Hamburg and an associated researcher to the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA). Her research focuses on contested international norms, more specifically on the rights of indigenous peoples in the context of conflicts over resources and land. Conceptually, she brings together norms research in International Relations, postcolonial perspectives, and critical (legal) anthropology. Her current interests is to understand and further conceptualize the politics of translation between different ontologies involved in resource conflicts. Her regional focus is on the Amazon rainforest, especially Peru.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Amazon Rainforest, Peru
Anne Tittor
Researcher in the Research Group Bioeconomy and Inequalities. Transnational Entanglements and Interdependencies in the Bioenergy Sector at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Her current research in Argentina and Europe focuses on socio-ecological conflicts, green grabbing and strategies of social-ecological transformation. She draws on Political Ecology, post- and decolonial perspectives and transnational studies. Further research focuses are global social inequalities, development theory, health and social policies, gender and intersectionality and social movements. Her main research areas are in Latin America, recently mainly Argentina and Nicaragua.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Latin America, esp. Argentina and Nicaragua
Erik van Doorn
Erik van Doorn‘s field of expertise is international law of the sea, with a main interest in the international regulation of marine resources but also new uses of the ocean and the effects of climate change. His research has focused on fisheries, mineral resources of the deep sea, and marine planning where questions relating to justice on an international level play an important role.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: The high seas
Sven Bergmann
Sven Bergmann is a cultural anthropologist currently working as a research associate at the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven, Germany where he is responsible for the thematic area Ocean, Ships and Environment and coordinates the Interreg Project “North Sea Wrecks” about environmental impact of ammunition in the sea. His research focuses on question of environmental impact of emerging objects such as microplastics or aquaculture-related toxins (e.g. algal blooms) or via the transport of species with container ships or ballot water. Therefore, his research contributes to an anthropology of speculative futures/temporalities and ecologies, always dealing with questions how to care for these emerging naturecultures with a feminist and postcolonial perspective. Regarding the specific spatialities and temporalities of waste, pollution and toxicity in the marine and maritime environments, question of environmental justice and “slow violence” have become more and more important in his research.
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)
Robert Hafner
Member of the interdisciplinary FWF Young Independent Research Group “Exploring values-based modes of production and consumption in the corporate food regime” at Innsbruck University. His current research focuses on (i) alternatives in the corporate food regime (including values like solidarity and trust), (ii) method development in the realms of viscerality to combine traditional methods with beyond rational/multisensory approaches, (iii) re-conceptualizations of human-environment-relations by exploring them through, despite and beyond technology. Empirical examples include soy agribusiness expansion and social-ecological conflicts in NW Argentina, online gardening and offline consuming, alternative producer-consumer relationships (e.g. CSA) and their potentials for social-ecological transformation. Robert Hafner’s main research areas are South America (esp. Argentina) and Central Europe (esp. Austria).
Country/Region of interest/research focus: South America (esp. Argentina) and Central Europe (esp. Austria)
Jonas Hein
Postdoctoral Researcher
I am researcher and lecturer at the Department of Geography at Kiel University, Associate Researcher at the German Development Institute and at the Collaborative Research Center 990 on Ecological and Socioeconomic Functions of Tropical Lowland Rainforest Transformation Systems (Sumatra, Indonesia) at University of Göttingen. I am interested in the political ecology of conservation and development, climate politics, agrarian change and state theory. Currently, I am working on the socio-ecological transformation of the Jakarta Bay and on the fairway adoption of the Elbe River. My research has mainly focused on Indonesia, Northern Germany and Colombia.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Indonesia, Northern Germany and Colombia
Keywords: Climate Politics, Marine Social Science, Political Ecology, Socio-Ecology
Hartmut Fünfgeld
Hartmut Fünfgeld is Professor of Geography of Global Change at the Institute for Environmental Social Sciences and Geography, University Freiburg. He also has an affiliation as Adjunct Professor with the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Hartmut studies the social and institutional dimensions of climate change impacts and adaptation to climate change, especially in the area of municipal and regional planning. Further research areas are social transformation processes and social justice in the context of global change. Hartmut Fünfgeld received his doctorate in human geography from the University of Heidelberg in 2006. He has over 15 years of work experience in research, teaching and advisory work in Europe, Oceania, Africa, and Asia.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Australia, Southern Germany
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.
Anna Lena Bercht
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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Benno Fladvad
Human geographer and currently working as Research Associate at the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Futures of Sustainability” at the University of Hamburg. His dissertation focused on the political geographies of the struggles for food sovereignty in Bolivia where he conducted several months of ethnographic research. His main research interests are political geography, political ecology, geographies of food, and geographies of justice, as well as sustainability and transformation research. His current research is centered on conflicting imaginations of sustainability, climate justice, and geographies of democracy in the Anthropocene. Besides his academic activities, he was working for WWF Germany and the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: South America, Bolivia
Gert Van Hecken
Assistant Professor at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB), University of Antwerp, Belgium. Main research focuses on the global and local nexus between the environment and processes of social change, and more specifically in the socio-political dynamics triggered by (international) conditional climate change/development finance instruments, such as carbon and biodiversity markets, Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), and green microfinance. Also works on alternative (transformational) paradigms, social movements and processes related to degrowth, and decolonial approaches to social-ecological futures. Research has mainly focused on Central- and South America, using participatory action research methods.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Central America
Libertad Chavez-Rodriguez
Researcher and lecturer at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology in Monterrey, Mexico, and a member of the Mexican National Researchers’ System. She’s also a member of the activist scholars collective Académic@s de Monterrey 43, and a member of the Redgesma (network for gender and environment). Her current research focuses on socio-spatial segregation and social vulnerability to hydro-meteorological hazards mainly using socio-anthropological methodologies. She integrates gender studies and political ecology perspectives to study socio-environmental issues. Her research lines include: social vulnerability to climate change; gender and environment; intersectionality and disasters; urban mobility and environmental justice. Libertad’s main research regions include Northern Germany, the Yucatán Peninsula and Northeast Mexico.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Mexico, Germany
Florian Dünckmann
Florian Dünckmann heads the working group for cultural geography at the Geography Department in Kiel. He deals with questions of political ecology, the development of rural areas and processes of democracy-building. Hannah Arend’s philosophy and current practical theories form the theoretical approach to these topics.
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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
Sébastien Boillat
Senior Researcher in Integrative Geography at the University of Bern. His current research focuses on agroecological transitions in sub-Saharan Africa with a critical perspective and an emphasis on social justice aspects. His research has the overall objective of integrating social-ecological thinking and the idea of justice. This includes conceptual and empirical work looking at environmental justice issues in telecoupled social-ecological systems, the relevance of cognitive justice in environmental governance and ecosystem management, and resilience justice in relation with climate change, natural resource governance and rural smallholders in the Global South. His main research areas are in Latin America (Bolivia, Cuba, Brazil) and in sub-Sahran Africa (Senegal, Kenya).
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Mountain Regions, Latin America, Africa
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
Sören Weißermel
Sören Weißermel is a human geographer and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Geography, Kiel University. Areas of interest are human-environmental relations, critical development studies, urban studies and urban climate politics. In his PhD-project, he focused on processes of dispossession and precarization of marginalized and invisibilized people and lifeforms in the context of the construction of the Belo Monte power plant (Brazil) and on their struggle for recognition and (environmental) justice. In his current project, he focuses on the socio-spatial implications of urban climate politics in cities of the Global North.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Brazil
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Friedrich Neu
Friedrich Neu is a researcher and lecturer at the Chair of Geography of Global Change at Freiburg University, with a teaching focus on climate change adaptation through excursions mainly to Switzerland and Ghana and through seminars scrutinizing adaptation processes in the Global South. His current PhD research is grounded in the interplay of anthropogenic climate change and human-induced environmental change in delta regions and particularly examines the adaptation to subsequent coastal erosion and inundation through state-led resettlement. Therein, a case study in Ghana’s Volta River Delta is used for empirical research. He applies strands of political ecology and justice perspectives to advance the recently created research field of Critical Geography of Resettlement within the spatial boundary of delta regions. Friedrich Neu’s main research area is in sub-Saharan Africa with a special focus on formerly Rwanda and currently Ghana.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Coastal Regions, Global South, Ghana
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.
Simon Radtke
Simon Radtke is studying for a Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Development at the University of Kiel and deals with questions of housing policy in times of neoliberalism and the right to the city / right to housing.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: India, Northern Germany, Ruhr Region
Yvonne Kunz
Researcher at the German Development Insitute in Bonn. Yvonne research interests are power asymmetries in access to natural resources. In her current research project she investigates air quality and evolving governance strucutres in Metro Manila, Philippines. Before, this she was involved in the DFG-funded project “Ecological and socio-economic functions of low land rainforest transformation systems in Sumatra, Indonesia”, where land and forests were the resources at focus, also in the context of governance and governability. She is still affiliated to this research project. Yvonne is also interested in feminist political ecologies.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Philippines, Indonesia, Kenya
Stephanie Leder
Researcher at the Department of Urban and Rural Development with interests in feminist political ecology, water resource management, gender and development research and geographical Education for Sustainable Development. Stephanie holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Cologne, Germany. She received a four-year Mobility Grant of FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning for the project “Revitalizing community-managed irrigation systems in contexts of out-migration in Nepal” (2019-2023). Currently Stephanie is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, UK.
Before she was a Postdoctoral Fellow for Gender, Poverty and Institutions at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Kathmandu, Nepal, and led studies in inter- and transdisciplinary projects within the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Program “Water, Land and Ecosystems” in India, Nepal and Bangladesh (2014-2017). For her PhD thesis, she conducted empirical research on Education for Sustainable Development in policy, textbooks and practice by examining geography teaching on water resources at secondary schools in Pune, India. Her book “Transformative Pedagogic Practice” is published with Springer 2018.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Nepal, India, Bangladesh
Silja Klepp
is Professor of Human Geography at Kiel University. She is a trained social anthropologist. Her research group “Social Dynamics in Coastal and Marine Areas” deals with human-environment relations in the Anthropocene. In her current research on climate change migration and adaptation, she integrates postcolonial perspectives, justice dimensions and critical theories in the study of the social effects of climate change. Silja’s field research experience includes countries such as Kiribati, Vanuatu, New Zealand, Italy, Libya, Malta, and Zambia. She is Alumna of the German Young Academy of Scientists (Die Junge Akademie) and an appointed member of the Council for Migration and the scientific advisory board of Heinrich Böll Foundation, amongst other transdisciplinary engagements. Together with Jonas Hein and Florian Dünckmann she founded the transdisciplinary network of environmental justice EnJust. In order to achieve more inclusive and creative ways of making science she works with transdisciplinary approaches and artistic research.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Kiribati, Vanuatu, New Zealand, Italy, Libya, Malta, and Zambia
Keywords: Climate Change Adaptation, Climate Politics, Inter-and Transdisciplinary Research Methods, Legal Geographies, Marine Social Science, Migration
Ulrich Gabriel
Leiter der Koordinierungsstelle Cross Compliance (Agrarförderung EU) im Umweltministerium Schleswig-Holstein, Honorarprofessor Wirtschaftsrecht Hochschule Wismar, Aufsichtsrat Phi-Stone AG; besonderes Interesse an Agrarökologie und solidarischem Wirtschaften.
Land/Interessenregion/Forschungsschwerpunkt: Deutschland