About
We have expertise in research on alternative organising, political economy, and plastic policy and governance.
“Plastics in a circular society: Alternative organising beyond resource efficiency” is a collaborative effort, bringing together an international interdisciplinary team of researchers from Lund University (Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, principal investigator; Johanna Gäbken; Johannes Stripple), Copenhagen Business School (Jacob Hasselbalch), and Geneva Graduate Institute (Carolyn Deere Birkbeck).
Interns from Lund University (Leon Auty, Divya Luciani and Vera Visser) have contributed to the project during the fall of 2023.
This research is funded by Formas (the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development), grant number 2021-02440.
The team
Ekaterina Chertkovskaya
Ekaterina Chertkovskaya (Lund University) explores visions, practices and strategies for socio-ecological transformation through the concept of degrowth. The plastic crisis is currently her key empirical focus. She has written on artistic interventions into the plastic crisis, zero-waste stores, and is keen on exploring how locally embedded whilst globally connected alternatives can spread.
Johanna Gäbken
Johanna Gäbken (Lund University) is working with businesses, schools and municipalities to reduce their plastic consumption as part of the initiative Plastikfreie Stadt. Johanna is fascinated by how focusing on plastics can spur a larger sustainability transformation and strives for improving the conditions for organisations working towards the common good.
Jacob Hasselbalch
Jacob Hasselbalch (Copenhagen Business School) works on the political economy of sustainability transformations. He is interested in cultural, political, and economic arrangements that make transformations difficult, and in how different actors navigate and contest those arrangements, also in relation to plastics governance and alternatives to the plastic crisis.
Johannes Stripple
Johannes Stripple (Lund University) has worked on environmental futures: how they are envisioned and how they could be imagined differently. He examines the politics of the environment and its governance through a range of sites, from the UN, the petroplastics complex to the urban, the arts and the everyday.
Carolyn Deere Birkbeck
Carolyn Deere Birkbeck (Geneva Graduate Institute) will join us during the third phase of the project, where we will be exploring the governance mechanisms that can enable alternatives to the plastic crisis to flourish.
Interns
If you are interested to do an internship or write your master’s thesis with us, you are welcome to get in touch. Here is the list of people who have contributed to the project in this capacity.
Leon Auty
Leon Auty contributed to the first phase of the project (mapping alternative organising initiatives) during the autumn semester 2023 as part of his internship for the Human Ecology master’s programme at Lund University. He is interested in transformational models of circular societies, having previously engaged with climate justice and degrowth, and is currently working on his master’s thesis on the political economy of reuse.
Divya Luciani
Divya Luciani contributed to the first phase of the project (mapping alternative organising initiatives) during the autumn semester 2023 as part of her internship for the Human Ecology master’s programme at Lund University. She has previous experience in the field of environmental education, is interested in the sociocultural narratives surrounding plastics in everyday life, and is currently working on her master’s thesis on scaling within the Break Free From Plastic movement.
Vera Visser
Vera Visser contributed to the first phase of the project (mapping alternative organising initiatives) during the autumn semester 2023 as part of her internship for the Human Ecology master’s programme at Lund University. She is interested in the relations people have with the materiality of plastics, having previously conducted ethnographic research on this through visual methods, and is currently working on her master’s thesis on food-rescue initiatives, degrowth and alternative organising.