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

Ottavia Cima is a geographer based in Switzerland, whose research focused on agri-food systems and ecological transformation in Asia and Europe. For her doctoral dissertation, she investigated the transformation of collective forms of agricultural production in Kyrgyzstan through the lenses of diverse economies. Together with Lucie, she argued for a postcapitalist postsocialism as a way to rethink the East (and the West).

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 Collective, janas currently engages with former Eastern cultural houses and present socio-cultural centers as places for transformative learning.

Petr Jehlička is a senior researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Broadly engaging in the geopolitics of knowledge production, his work challenges the hegemonic notion of sustainability and seeks to diversify its conceptualisations from the perspective of the epistemically peripheral ‘Global East’. Drawing on research conducted with colleagues in Central and Eastern Europe, and more recently in China, he highlights the importance of everyday, quiet, and already-existing sustainabilities and questions the prioritisation of sustainability potentials that are implicitly located in the future – a tendency that dominates international sustainability scholarship. Empirically, his research is situated at the intersection of formal and informal food systems, frugal food practices, and alternative forms of environmentalism.

Nadia Johanisova has taught and promoted critical economics and community economies  at the Department of Environmental Studies at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic,  since 1998. She is now semi-retired and writing a book on sustainable economic alternatives  with Tom Smith. Her research interests include histories  of co-operatives in the Global East  and community economies in Global South countries. 

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.

Thomas S.J. Smith is a researcher, writer and editor based in the north of Spain. He received his PhD in geography and sustainable development at the University of St Andrews and has since held numerous roles, including postdoctoral researcher in environmental studies at Masaryk University, Brno, and Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow in geography at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU), Munich. He is a member of the Community Economies Institute (CEI) and on the board of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI). His research interests relate to social ecological transformations, economic localisation, and degrowth.

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.