Dr. Pieter Rondelez is a researcher of social movements and social change in the urban environment. He defended his PhD thesis ‘A study of social change: the municipalist experiment in Spain’ in 2022 at the University of Ghent, department of conflict and Development Studies. He was a guest at our open seminar series on 11 October.
On Tuesday, 20 September at 2PM (CEST), Dr. Eoin McLaughlin was our guest in our open seminar series. Dr. McLaughlin is a senior Lecturer in Economics at University College Cork. His research interests are in economic, financial and social history. In one of his current projects the aim is to trace levels of sustainability from the mid 19th century to present day using the Genuine Savings Metric (GS). GS is an indicator propagated by the World Bank, measuring progress and development and is proven as a relevant indicator of sustainable development.
Dr. Amineh Ghorbani was our guest in our open seminar series on Tuesday 28 june, 11AM (CEST). Ghorbani is an Associate professor of Institutional Modelling and Analysis at the Energy and Industry group at TU Delft. She is also an affiliated member of the Institutional Grammar Research Initiative, Institutions for Collective Action and the Ostrom Workshop. In her research Ghorbani focuses on the role of institutions in climate change mitigation and adaptation. She uses modelling, simulation, network analysis in combination with qualitative methods to conduct her research.
On 3 May, dr. Mette Løvschal (Aarhus University) was the speaker in our Open Seminar series. In the ANTHEA project, she and her colleagues look at the sustenance of man-made heathlands, which existence spans over millennia. Løvschal went into the ancestral commons and grazing commons that went hand in hand with these heathlands. During the subsequent discussion, some similarities with developments in Europe and North America were considered.
On 29 February, 11AM (CET) the guest speaker of our Open seminar talks series was Lakshmi A.J., who is Assistant Professor at Kerala University, department of Commerce. In her work she focuses on professionalism in co-operatives and the legal framework of credit cooperatives in India, looking at long-term developments.
On 22 March, 11AM (CET) the guest speaker of our Open seminar talks series was Daniel Petrovics (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam). He presented a paper on polycentric governance and the conditions under which energy communities scale.
On 9 March, research team Institutions for Collective Action had a double open seminar. Grant Halliday, historian and research intern at RSM Erasmus University, gave an insight into the development of rules and sanctions in medieval and early-modern fishery cooperatives in Spain. Dr. Florian Grisel, associate professor at the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, complemented Halliday’s findings with a presentation about another fishery cooperative, the Prud’homie de Pêche of Marseille. In the subsequent discussion, the attendants considered the existence of norms versus formal legal structures, as well as the continuation of such organizations over centuries.
On 15 February Kristel Maasen, sociologist at Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) presented a summary of her PhD dissertation in our Open Seminar. Drawing from the theory of the commons and commoning, Maasen shows how worker-organized cooperatives are organized in commons. Workers invest in creating and maintaining a we-relation through task selection, sharing of organisational power, commitment to the project and a focus on direct communication. Distinct from a managerial logic, the principles used by workers correspond to the logic of commons organising in that they produce and reproduce community.
On Tuesday 8 February, Dr. Camille Meyer (University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business) presented a seminar on the ownership of biological knowledge originally held by indigenous communities. After demonstrating that such knowledge was released to the public domain by colonial botanists, he presented three case studies showing that international, national and local efforts have been made for such resources to be “recommonized” by local communities. In such cases, indigenous communities reclaim ownership of their traditional knowledge by establishing intellectual property rights on biological knowledge.
Dr. Francesco Pasimeni is an industrial engineer and he was the guest speaker of Research Team Social Enterprise and Institutions for Collective Action on 25 January. Dr. Pasimeni holds a PhD in Science and Technology Policy Studies from SPRU (University of Sussex). He presented parts of his thesis about Modelling Fractional Ownership in the Sharing Economy and more specifically about the diffusion of shared goods in consumer coalitions. Pasimeni explained the model he has built to calculate where there is a niche in the economy for shared goods, with the eventual goal to obtain more sustainable consumption patterns.