Postdoctoral researcher Véronique De Herde is taking her next step after working with Social Enterprises & Institutions for Collective Action for 1,5 years. She starts a three-year postdoctoral mandate at the University of Liège, Center for Social Economy, with professor Frédéric Dufays. The research will focus on cooperative models of value chain organization in the agri-food sector. The objective is to disentangle the complex factors contributing to their strategic relevance for sustainable transitions.

Research group SE&ICA welcomes dr. Enrique Santamaría Echeverría as an affiliate researcher. Enrique is a researcher in Innovation of Public Law at Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands).

His research focuses on the relations between the human body and the law. Although it focuses predominately on bio law and private law problems, it also has a strong cross/interdisciplinary component, and tackles issues closely related to the fields of bio ethics, philosophy, data governance, and the protection of human dignity and other fundamental rights. His most recent research interests include health data governance, data and genome commons and health data cooperatives.

Grant Halliday, who has been with the team as a research intern since September 2021, will start his PhD near the end of the month. It will be a History PhD at the University of Michigan, with the current plan focusing on early medieval economic and environmental history. He’ll likely be working on some aspect of institutions surrounding agriculture and peasant organizations in the Merovingian period. It will be a interdisciplinary project, as he is hoping to bring in some archaeobotanical research in along with institutional theory. He is also thinking of ways to analyze collective action in the period, something that a few other researchers have begun to explore in the last couple years.

A word from Grant: “I certainly hope to continue fishing collective research on the side as well and will certainly keep up with the team. Working with this group has put me on a good footing for graduate study, I believe, and I can’t thank everyone enough for their kindness and support!”

We are happy to announce that dr. Thomas Bauwens, assistant professor at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development (Utrecht University) has aligned with the research group Social Enterprise and Institutions for Collective action as an affiliate researcher. His research focuses on economy, community enterprises and sustainability transitions. Welcome! See for more information his profile page.