Environmental Justice & Climate Justice Studies

Udi Mandel Butler’s work focuses on enlivened learning practices for regenerating ecologies and communities and for reimagining higher education to offer hopeful futures. This has included a collaboration with social and ecological movements and indigenous communities across the globe. Udi has co-founded with Kelly Teamey and others the Enlivened Learning project and the Ecoversities Alliance– an international alliance of places of learning and higher education committed to social and ecological justice and regeneration. Udi’s work combines social research, historically contextualized and critically ethnographic, with more co-creative and collaborative methods of inquiry. In addition to published articles and books Udi experiments with creative forms of communication, such as documentary filmmaking and collaborative exhibitions. Udi received a PhD in social anthropology from Goldsmiths College (University of London), an MScin International Development from the University of Bristol, and an MFA from the University of Edinburgh and has held faculty appointments at the School of International Training (USA), EARTH University (Costa Rica), the University of Bristol (UK), and the University of Oxford.

Vasna Ramasar (PhD, South Africa/Sweden) is an Associate Senior Lecturer in the Division of Human Ecology, Department of Human Geography, Lund University and a Research affiliate at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS) in Sweden. She is the Programme Director for the Culture, Power and Sustainability international Masters. Her research and teaching focuses on political ecology; environmental governance and alternatives to development from a feminist and decolonial perspective. Being a generalist at heart, she is most interested trying to understand the big picture of how people and planetary dynamics come together and the complexity of these interactions for social and environmental justice. Vasna has worked for over a decade outside academia across Africa, India, USA and Europe. She is a core group member of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (globaltapestryofalternatives.org), Post-Development Academic Activist Group (PEDAGOG) and the Non-Binary people and Women of Colour group Copenhagen.

Alessandra Pomarico (PhD, USA/Italy) is an independent curator, writer and educator working at the intersection of arts, pedagogy, social issues, and nano-politics. Steering committee member of the global Ecoversities Alliance (www.ecoversities.org) dedicated to reimagining higher education, Alessandra is the co-founder of Free Home University, artistic and pedagogical experiment on commoning and knowledge sharing (www.fhu.art), social practice hub Ammirato Culture House, and residency program Sound Res. Editor of www.artseverywhere.ca, she curated: Pedagogies Otherwise, The Reader; co-edited What’s there to learn; and When the Roots Start Moving: On displacement and belonging (2021).