I am Assistant Professor of Transformative Governance and Democracy at the Copernicus Institute at Utrecht University, and co-coordinate the Capstone phase of the transdisciplinary European CHARM-EU Master on 'Global Challenges for Sustainability'. I am a research fellow of the global Earth System Governance Project and co-convene its working group on Democracy. 

My research focuses on democracy and justice for the governance of social-ecological transformations, with a focus on radical and ecological democracy, food governance, community-based initiatives, social movements, and Seed Commons.

My work takes deep leverage points for sustainability transformation as the starting point. It challenges dominant unsustainable discourses and paradigms, such as a growth focus, human-nature dichotomies, and focus on expert, technocratic knowledge. It aims to reveal incumbent power relations embedded in dominant institutions and practices. It aims to shine light on and empower the many already lived, prefigurative 'real utopias' on the ground and understand conditions for them to achieve wider transformative impact. I research how bottom-up grassroots relate to top-down structures and ways to co-create more empowering supportive institutions. This includes alternative forms of achieving pluralistic, democratic directionality towards socially and ecologically just transformations. I take a transformative and transdisciplinary research approach to incorporate pluralist voices and types of knowledge in my research.

Taking the threat of fascism and climate collapse seriously, my current research centers on how community-based solidarity initiatives and movements prefigure grassroots-democracy and social-ecological transformation in practices of resistance and solidarity prepping.

I obtained my cumulative PhD in the transdisciplinary research project RightSeeds at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, for which I was awarded the University Society Oldenburg Award for an Outstanding Dissertation. My dissertation examined how Seed Commons initiatives are affected by the complex Multi-Level Governance system around plant genetic resources, biodiversity, intellectual property rights and seed legislation in Germany and the Philippines, and at the EU and the global level. I analyzed how these seed initiatives as ‘real utopias’ on the ground and as social movements contribute to creating more empowering institutions and practices for a social-ecological transformation of agri-food systems.