​PSL COHORT 2023

Erica Alexandra Droeske Angers​

​Erica is currently completing an Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Public Policy, a joint program based in Vienna and Barcelona, with research focusing on extreme weather events and climate displacement in her home city of Ottawa, Canada. She has worked in conservation and food justice for over ten years, first as a farmer, then urban farmer/community builder, and finally in ocean/freshwater advocacy across Canada. Erica loves music, art, and dance, and sees these as an essential part of the environmental movement. She has volunteered for years with many arts projects and regularly attends all kinds of related events.

Andrew Sanger

Originally from Detroit, Michigan, Andrew has been based in London, UK since 2016. He is currently a Lecturer in Dance at Roehampton University and a PhD researcher in Anthropology at University College London. Alongside teaching and research, he is a company dancer with Jody Oberfelder Projects and has toured in the USA, UK, and Germany. His primary research topic is the relationship between dance, performance, and environmental activism in the UK and has delivered workshops on these topics in academic and artistic contexts. His professional practice combines ethnography, performance, queerness, and ecology both embodied and inscribed.

Melina Roise

Melina Ann Roise (she/they) is a sometimes farmer, sometimes curator, sometimes academic, studying dancer, writer, and artist of plant medicines. She currently works with Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck and the Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College, the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, and recently completed a curatorial fellowship with COMMON GROUND: an international festival on the politics of land and food. In addition to playing with botanicals, studying radical ecological politics, and hanging out with worms, Melina is a maker of many birthday cakes. She currently lives on and with Mohican land on the banks of the Mahicannituck (Hudson River). ​

​Helene Schulze

I am a PhD candidate exploring human-seed entanglement in cities. I am interested in the ways seed savers, particularly of migrant heritage, subvert a long colonial and xenophobic regime which has dominated the international movement of plant material. I am part of the collective behind the London Freedom Seed Bank, a grassroots urban seed network, and the Garden of Earthly Delights, a guerrilla gardening collective and am interested in mutual aid, particularly from feminist, anticolonial, antiracist and indigenous perspectives, and how multispecies collaboration can help us build most just and care-full futures.

Violetta Koutsoukou

I am a first year PhD candidate in Social Anthropology (Panteion University, Athens) and my research focuses on the techno-social and techno-cultural aspects of modern spirituality and wellness industry. Working through a feminist and decolonial lens, with and around online/offline practices of (self)care such as yoga and meditation, I am interested in the emerging reradicalization of care practices as well as the mounting neoliberal commodification of them (and the endless space that exists between the two) in a global context. Through my work I wish to express concerns about the increasing planetary vulnerability and imagine ways to create otherwise.

Kristina Ford

Kristina Ford is a visual artist and archives specialist completing her Master’s degree in Cultural Heritage Studies in Vienna, Austria. She is passionate about the creative ways that memory work and information science can inform identity and build community. Kristina has developed both grassroots and digital humanities-based community outreach projects that teach history and art education. She believes that record-keeping, liberal arts, and community building are essential for establishing impactful climate change initiatives. Kristina loves spending time in the mountains and the forest, and hopes to bring the nourishment of the landscape into her work.

Laura Vigil Escalera Mier

Hello! My name is Laura (she/her). I am an energetic Mexican woman pursuing a Master’s in Gender Studies at the Central European University in Vienna. I hold a BA in Environmental Sciences from UNAM Mexico, and my academic research focuses on the interlinkages between environmental degradation and gender issues. For my master’s thesis, I analyze the “feminist action for climate justice coalition” of the Generation Equality Forum under a decolonial feminist approach. In my spare time, I enjoy dancing, hiking, and playing capoeira; A sport that has been with me since childhood and has brought me a lot of joy.

Anastasia Chatzimentor

I am Anastasia Chatzimentor and I am currently working as a PhD student in several research projects in the Department of Ecology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. At this moment, I am finishing my PhD thesis on climate change impacts upon marine biodiversity and the identification of areas of high risk for species in the Mediterranean and functional traits in the Aegean and Ionian Sea.

Liliana Castillo Neira

I'm Liliana Castillo Neira, a Colombian-Mexican historian focusing on art, culture, and society. I'm pursuing a master's in Digital Humanities at Universidad de Los Andes. I specialize in data and sound visualization, information architecture,  AI, and developing digital tools to teach history to diverse communities, including senior citizens and indigenous people. I'm a Sr. UX Writer at Mercado Libre; I always search for innovative ways to create engaging content. Exploring theories from disciplines like philosophy, physics, and astronomy can enrich my work and make it more interesting. I enjoy traveling, hiking with my dogs, painting, rock climbing, and learning new languages.

Kristiane Fehrs

Kristiane Fehrs is a research assistant at the Department of Sociology at Technical University Dresden since April 2023. Currently she is developing an ethnographic research project that deals with the energy transition and the emergence of hydrogen infrastructures in former brown coal regions in Saxony. She studied at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University Berlin (MA) and at HafenCity University in Hamburg (BA). She is interested in questions revolving around climate change, transformation, human-environment relations and infrastructures and is passionate about experimenting with ethnographic methods.

Kyla Simone Piccin

Kyla Simone Piccin is a first year PhD student at the University of Cambridge. She studies the policing and militarization of resource extraction geographies in Canada, with a focus on other-than-human political subjectivities and human/other-than-human entanglements. Broadly, her research interests include feminist political economy, geographies of criminalization and surveillance, settler-colonial nation building, anti-colonial ontologies, and multi-species justice. She has experience in community organizing, particularly with the prison abolition movement and in generating community-led, feminist approaches to public safety. Her passions include reading speculative fiction, hip-hop dancing, soul music, and swimming. Kyla was born in London, Ontario, Canada, and has a Bachelor of Arts in International Development Studies from Trent University, and a Master of Arts in Political Economy from Carleton University, Ottawa.

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​Andrea Bordoli

Andrea Bordoli has a background in Visual Anthropology (MA, University of Manchester), Visual Arts – Cinema (HEAD – Genève), and Anthropology and Philosophy (BA, Neuchâtel University). His research and practice lies at the intersection between anthropological theory, film and visual art. He is currently based between Switzerland and Québec, pursuing a practice-led PhD in Media Anthropology at the University of Bern as part of the interdisciplinary project “Mediating the Ecological Imperative”. Since January 2022 he is an associated artist-researcher at McGill University anthropology department’s Critical Media Lab. His works have been presented in academic settings and exhibited in film festivals and art spaces nationally and internationally.

 Lydia Karazarifi

I am a PhD candidate in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. My research focuses on water as commons through the lens of water movement trajectories and participatory water management alternatives in Southern European countries. I am interested in the connection between social movement studies, political ecology and democratization processes. My background is in Psychology and Social and Cultural Anthropology. My work experience includes field research using ethnographic methods, multimedia, and life stories. I am looking forward to meeting you at this year's PSL!

Darinka Szigecsan

Hi! I’m Darinka and I am currently completing my masters in Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University in England. My work is entangling new materialist philosophy, phenomenology and queer ecology. My thesis, under the working title of Softening into the Inbetween, is playing with ideas of touch, rhythm, language and texture to unfold ways in which our ‘edges’ are composed and decomposed and to reflect on experiences that allow for softening, where we can experience the ‘me’ as a ‘we’, and defy ideas of rigid dualism. I'm excited to be participating in Pelion Summer Lab  2023. 

Femke Vulto

My name is Femke Vulto and I am a DPhil student in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. My research project concerns the supply chain of brown shrimp and its divergent sites of production, circulation, and consumption. I am interested in how this supply chain is rendered part of ‘ordinary life’ through everyday actions, and I am excited to participate in this summer lab to explore more experimental ways to capture how human and other-than-humans participate in world-building practices under conditions of contemporary capitalism.

Sydney Kostoglanis

Sydney Kostoglanis is a senior majoring in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Following her graduation in May of 2024, she will remain at the University of Michigan in pursuit of her Master’s degree in Transcultural Studies. Currently, she is interested in exploring the legacies of the devastation of the Greek Civil War period in her grandmother’s native Cephalonia.

Merve Şen

Merve Şen is a dual-title PhD student in Comparative Literature and Visual Studies at Penn State University. Her research interests include Turkish literature and culture; medical humanities; visual studies; posthumanism; technology; and archival studies. Her dissertation project engages with multimedia works that consider and/or experiments with the hospital as a sensory and material environment. She is interested in multispecies and collective world-making practices across cultures and disciplines.

Nikolina Zenović

​​​​​Nikolina Zenović is a Ph.D. student in linguistic anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington. She obtained her MA in social sciences with a concentration in anthropology from the University of Chicago and her BA in anthropology and peace & conflict studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Nikolina has previously considered intersections between language and environmental activism in the Balkans. Her current research explores interconnections between language use, sustainability, and soundscapes in Greece

Katerina Talianni

Katerina Talianni holds a PhD in Music from the University of Edinburgh. In her thesis she interrogates the urban environment through sound to examine the meaning of sound in society. Her research interests include the study of auditory culture and environmental sound art, in order to create narratives around the sounds of the different forms of climate agency, and how they might shape future living through a mode of ecocritical listening. She is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Peloponnese in the Department of Digital and Performative Arts. She is also co-editor of the journal Airea: Arts and Interdisciplinary Research.

Zofia Jakubowicz-Prokop

I’m a PhD candidate at the Interdisciplinary Doctoral School, University of Warsaw in Poland. I have a master's degree in cultural studies. My PhD thesis concerns Polish writer Zofia Nałkowska’s (1884–1954) literary writings which I juxtapose with several contemporary feminist thinkers, such as Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway or Elizabeth Grosz. My main focus is how Nałkowska had portrayed nature in her literary fiction, and how her vision of nature relates to her feminist standpoint. My academic interests range from posthumanism, new materialism, and ecohumanities to feminist philosophy and disability studies. I’m Main Editor’s Assistant in Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research.

Dimitra Morosou

I am Dimitra Morosou, a senior at the University of Thessaly, majoring in Social Anthropology. I am currently working on my thesis researching the reasons why white masculinities and femininities in Greece choose to wear Afrocentric hairstyles and how black femininities of African diaspora in Greece interpret this choice, based on critical race theory. I am a member of the dëcoloиıze hellάş student network and sometimes I try to write slam poetry.

Nadia Wierzbicka ​

Nadia Wierzbicka – philosopher and curator. She graduated from University of Warsaw, also being a student at the University of Barcelona and KU Leuven. Creator of exhibitions, performances and art installations. As an activist, she collaborated with the All-Poland Women Strike and the Extinction Rebellion movement. Currently working on her article Hormonal Milieu and its Hackers about the relation between identity and power for Praktyka Teoretyczna journal.

Erika Tsioukantana

Erika Tsioukantana is currently a senior year student majoring in Social Anthropology at the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology of University of Thessaly. Her research interests include digital and cultural studies, identity narratives and senses. She is currently writing her senior thesis on virtual influencers based on cross-platform research.

Antonios Petras

Antonios Petras (he/him) is currently doing his MA in “Mobility Studies” at the University of Thessaly, Greece. He was an undergraduate student at the same department from which he acquired an Anthropology and a History BA. He is also a member of the student network of the “Decolonize Hellas” initiative. His academic interests include extractivism, postcolonial theory, climate crisis and grassroots organizations. During his BA, he was an exchange student at Bard College NY and has also worked on several podcasts. He is a terrible dancer who enjoys dancing, a terrible singer who enjoys singing and a terrible writer who enjoys writing.

Tyler Lutz

I work at the intersection of science and literature, but not to “bridge the gap,” think with “both sides of the brain,” or reconcile our “two cultures.” I’m committed, rather, to thinking the gap itself: to charting the space between literature and science by respecting both the difference and interpenetration of its limiting terms. Meeting literature and science in their ecological middle— examining both how literature has shaped scientific practice and how science has informed literary reading and writing in turn—I explore the manifold modes of co-constitution between human and non-human domains that animate contemporary ecological thinking.