The first entry in a Journal always feels to me like calmly opening a door and stepping into a room full of people ready to hear a story. Since it has been almost a year since I started this journey, there are a few things to say.
I was particularly lucky to be able to travel to Vienna on the 1st of July 2020 being in the middle of a world pandemic. I came here directly from Barcelona, where I had just finished my master’s in Political Ecology, Degrowth and Environmental Justice.
During the first days I had the chance to get to know the people at my new institution – Modul University Vienna. They are an amazing bunch of human beings and they welcomed me with open arms and helped me to settle in during an especially uncertain and exceptional time.
I am originally from Andalucía and throughout these years – due to studies, jobs, economic crises, and life – I lived in places like Manchester, Utrecht, Granada and Barcelona. As always, the place is not of as much importance as the people who surround you. Now, working at Modul University and with the i-CONN network, I find myself again surrounded by and working with a highly stimulating, great group of people. The circumstances, however, have only allowed us (the i-CONN network) to see each other virtually. Collaboration without human contact feels especially weird to me, but so far, we are managing and adapting quite decently!
During these first months I got to know a bit more about the city of Vienna and the people I’m working with. I am at the Sustainability, Governance, and Methods Department at Modul University, which combines a variety of research interests all driven by our common desire to understand the world and, hopefully, transform it into a better place.
My research is about developing interdisciplinary approaches to the study of flows of critical energy resources. In particular, I want to focus on the interplay between the biophysical world and the political-economic sphere. How do they interact and shape each other? How are unsustainable socio-ecological configurations sustained and reproduced? What are the roles of power and power dynamics? The aim is to shed some light on those questions and unveil potential critical nodes within the system.
During the next entries I will focus more on details about different things. I expect this journal to be a mixture of interesting research topics that I am working on, personal opinions on a variety of research-oriented issues, anecdotes, the city of Vienna and dynamics of collaboration within the i-CONN network.
See you soon!