Forschung extern

Please give us an overview about your main research focus and current research topics.

I'm a rural sociologist, working on rural and food governance at the intersection of agrarian social movements and formal policy processes. Thereby, I adopt an interdisciplinary perspective informed by intersectional feminist analysis, exploring both visible and hidden forms of oppression, discrimination, opportunity, and privilege, the latter “hidden” form being particularly important when it comes to understanding the way in which agricultural policies shape the lives of women and women farmers. 

What are the challenges and obstacles involved in transforming our food systems? 

Transforming food systems is complex and shaped by the ways we govern. In the context of my work, governance refers to the full set of relations, rules, and norms, not just government action. I see three main challenges, the first being fragmentation, which means poorly aligned, competing policies and actors. Fragmentation makes coordinated transformation difficult, it obscures accountability, and reinforces power imbalances, especially through corporate concentration and profit-driven logics. It also exhausts less well-resourced actors, hampering systematic protest and change. The second is multi-stakeholder governance. While this can increase participation, it often shifts responsibility away from states, without really changing power relations: the private sector and dominant narratives remain influential, while authority changes little. The third is the question of whose knowledge counts in these processes: now we see that complex models and technological perspectives dominate, while interdisciplinary, lived, and Indigenous knowledge is marginalized. To sum up, food governance is a space that has been expanding, and power has become increasingly dispersed, but not transferred, and at the same time concentrated. This has implications for who can participate, how they can participate, and with what effect.

What motivated you to teach and research at BOKU, and what were your main goals?

Aside the long-standing collaboration between Wageningen and BOKU, my main motivation was to work with Stefanie Lemke. We met 20 years ago working on food security, nutrition and gender, and now collaborate in the Horizon Europe SWIFT project. Connecting our work and expertise here was a natural step. Also, as an educator I wanted to learn from Stefanie’s team, using very student‑centred teaching methods with a caring though critical learning environment, creating safe spaces while pushing students into productive discomfort. Finally, my expertise fits well with the courses I was invited to teach, Gender, nutrition and right to food and Climate Scholar activism.

Do you have a key message for students and young scientists?

I want to encourage them to take science seriously, to recognize that it is powerful and political, and to use their time at a world-class university to really master their domain, to understand the strengths and the limits of their science. Then I would encourage them to use their expertise with a lot of humility, as otherwise we miss out on other ways of knowing that are equally valid, and that are often silenced in ways that can limit more just transformations.