Doctoral researchers Daniela Gomel and Carol Bardi, part of the research group SABio, have completed a two-month research stay at the University of Münster. Carol is Brazilian, and her research case study is also conducted in Brazil. She researches alternative forms of agricultural production that do not cater to global value chains and commercial markets, picking up on recent calls for more initiatives that may increase food systems’ sustainability. Carol’s research proposes to focus on the empirical evidence of potential contributions of food self-provisioning practices (FSP) in promoting just food transitions. Such practices can be roughly described as the outcome of people producing food mainly for non-commercial purposes.
Daniela is from Argentina and also conducts her research from her country. She is doing research on the factors that shape policy processes related to forest policies in commodity producer countries of soy and beef. For doing so, she will undertake field work in Paraguay and Argentina being that they share the Gran Chaco ecoregion, which host the second largest forests in Latin America and that face the consequences of the advancement of soy and beef production.
During their visit in Germany, Carol and Daniela developed several academic activities. They collaborated as a lecturer in a full-day teaching block in the Masters Course ‘Sustainability Transitions from an International Perspective’ at the Institute of Political Science, where students learned and engaged in discussions about ecofeminism and degrowth as well as the fundamentals of sustainability transitions from a critical perspective and the main components of policy briefs and advocacy. Part of Carol’s lecture was a hands-on workshop on the iceberg model approach to policy-making. Students shared their impressions on applying the model and noticed it helped them to show that policies usually do not get to the root causes of the problems they aim to solve.
Other activities in which Daniela and Carol participated were the SABio team several meetings to discuss career development, possible joint publications and to prepare collectively for upcoming conferences. They were also active in the activities the Brazil Centre organised, including participating in an institutional lunch to discuss further collaboration in South America. Finally, Carol Bardi presented her ongoing academic work at two conferences: the joint Ecological Economics and Degrowth conference in Pontevedra, Spain and both, Daniela and Carol participated in the Annual Conference of the Society of Latin American Studies (SLAS) at the University of Amsterdam.
