QUALIFICATIONS

1998    Ph.D., Social and Political Sciences, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University
1990    RNDr., Geography, Charles University, Prague

PRINCIPAL RESEARCH INTERESTS

Sustainable Consumption; Alternative Sustainabilities; Geography of Knowledge Production; Diverse Economies; Formal and Informal Food Systems; Food Waste; Resilience; Sharing Economy; Environmental Politics; Temporality; Central and Eastern Europe.

RESEARCH PROFILE

My research, initially focused on East European green politics and environmental movements, evolved to explore the ‘Europeanization’ of environmental governance in new EU member states. Subsequently, I turned my attention to informal sustainable food practices in Eastern Europe at the household level, including food self-provisioning, sharing and foraging and their combination with securing food via market-based channels. Realising that Eastern Europe is an exceptionally fertile ground for this research, this work sparked interest in the geopolitics of knowledge production and context-dependent hierarchies of knowledge claims. This research agenda has been disseminated by a string of articles published, among others, in Progress in Human Geography, Journal of Rural Studies, Agriculture and Human Values and Geoforum. Maintaining these dual objectives, my current project RESOURCE investigates household food waste production and water consumption in Czechia and the Netherlands. It grapples with questions about where and how what is considered universal knowledge on sustainability is produced, communicated and accepted.