I am an Assistant Professor & Senior Lecturer at the School of Sustainability, Governance, and Methods at the Modul University Vienna, Austria. Currently, I am also working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, in the project Open4ET – Open Organising for Energy Transition, which investigates the potentials and barriers of participatory governance models for addressing energy transition with an Austrian case study. Moreover, I am a Guest Researcher at the Institute for Ecological Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria.

My research investigates the potential and challenges of active citizen participation and community-led initiatives in the governance of social ecological transformation. In particular, I aim to explore the possibilities of proactively 'claimed' spaces of participation by citizen initiatives, and the relationships that unfold between policymakers and citizens in the co-production of local provisioning systems. In doing so, I understand participatory governance as an interplay of asymmetrically distributed agency and structures. Having an interdisciplinary background, I draw in my work on insights from ecological economics, sociology, international relations, geography and others. My further research interests include deliberative democracy, the foundational economy, grassroots innovation, degrowth, energy justice, critical realism, and multicriteria mapping.