Paraphrasing Maria Mercé Marçal: I please three virtues, to be a heterodox scientist, to be an independent activist, and to be a woman! “And the turbulent clarity of being three times rebellious…”
I’m a postdoctoral researcher and coordinator of the AGATA project at the Chair of Agroecology and Agro-food systems, Uvic-UCC. Bachelor in Classical Literature, I moved then to Environmental Sciences linking social and ecological dimensions for investigating global change and I obtained my Degree from the University of Milano Bicocca, Italy, and my PhD from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, in the area of expertise of Ecological Economics.
My research experience and work in collaboration with communities and grassroots organizations has been influencing my transdisciplinary profile, pushing me to explore out of the box on how integrating focus and methods from the social and natural sciences (and arts) as well as from scientific and local/indigenous knowledge systems to study the vulnerability and adaptation of rural agro-food systems to global change. Currently, my line of research focuses on the analysis of socio-institutional innovations, collective actions and the role of traditional and local knowledge in adapting to global environmental, cultural and socioeconomic changes, especially in agricultural and (silvo) pastoral systems of the Mediterranean context and high mountain regions (Andes and Himalayas). Through a perspective of feminist political ecology applied to studies of adaptation and resilience, my research is oriented to understand the dynamics of power that create inequalities, and the differential conditions that create new opportunities in the transformations of social-ecological rural systems.
I have collaborated with several research and research-action institutions, working at the interface between science-policy and society. I worked for three years (2002-2005) for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in Rome and in the field and I collaborated with different environment and development NGOs. In 2006 I came back to Academy, collaborating with UAB and FAREM- Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Nicaragua. I then collaborated with the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds (UK) as predoctoral Marie Curie Slodovoska young fellow and as a postdoctoral researcher with the Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences of the Mediterranean at the University of Evora, Portugal (2015-2016), the Autonomous University of Madrid (2013-2014), the Basque Center for Climate Change of the Basque Country (2012). Since 2015, I have participated in the group of experts of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
Since October 2017, I’ve been co-partner of the association FRACTAL, Feminist Researchers in Action for Transformation. The group is composed by women researchers coming from different trajectories, expertise, and institutions, joined by common aspirations, concerns and the firm belief of passion, determination and effective planning to meet the social-environmental challenges our world is facing. I’m also part of the SOPCi (Society, Policy and Inclusive Communities) group and the Centre d’Estudis INterdisciplinaris de Gènere, UVic.