Polička thrives thanks to a broad community of collaborators – here is a closer look at the dedicated core team driving our current work:

Anja Decker is a cultural anthropologist at the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences. She studies diverse economies and municipalism in rural peripheries, focusing on the interplay of everyday and transformative agency, modes of governance and the social organization of alternative economic practices. Her current research examines household food provisioning from a mobilities perspective, tracing flows between rural, urban, and digital spaces.

janas gebauer is a freelance researcher, facilitator, and narrator based in Berlin. janas’ focus is on eco-solidary futures beyond growth, integrating the perspectives of diverse economies and degrowth with social debates on transformations and utopias, as well as collective storytelling and speculation. In the context of Polička Kollektiv, janas currently engages with former Eastern cultural houses and present socio-cultural centers as places for transformative learning.

Sunna Kovanen is a research associate in the Department of Regional Planning at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (BTU). Her Phd thesis at the University of Leipzig concerned stability and transformative potential of eco-social enterprises in Alentejo, Portugal and Brandenburg, Germany in the context of rural (post-)development. With the AlterPerimentale project, Sunna cuerrently seeks to enhance the quality of life for older adults in the German-Polish border region of Brandenburg and Saxony by co-creating and testing community-based innovations with civil society, regional development, and social economy actors.

Lilian Pungas is an activist scholar in the broad field of political ecology and degrowth and the board/coordinator of the German Wachstumswende plattform. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical agrarian/food studies, ecofemism/care and postsocialist/postcolonialism studies. Originally from Estonia, based in Berlin and working as a Postdoc at the Central European University in Vienna, within Polička she brings together her transdisciplinary focus and engaged research around the topics of food and social-ecological provisioning from/in the East.

Markus Sattler is based at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL) in Leipzig. His research focuses on diverse and community economies in the South Caucasus and his home town Leipzig. Interests include the analysis enterprises or other social actors that contribute to sufficiency in the web of life, often through non-monetized practices such as provisioning, mutual aid, labour rotation, or even feasting.

Lucie Sovová works at the Rural Sociology Group of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and the Department of Geography of Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia. Her research is broadly concerned with alternative economic thought and practice in relation to food and agriculture.