Bringing justice to environmental research: a career in critical social science
I am an Associate Professor at Imperial College London, where I lead the Critical Environmental Social Science group. I am a human geographer and political ecologist with a background spanning both the natural and social sciences. After completing my PhD at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, I moved to the UK and spent a decade in the Geography Department at Cambridge and a year in the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford, before moving to the Autonomous University of Barcelona for two years.
My academic path has always been inseparable from my view of theory as inextricably linked to praxis. My commitment to environmental and social justice shaped both my undergraduate dissertation and my PhD research, which focused on the socio-environmental conflicts surrounding the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens -particularly the canoeing centre in Schinias, very close to where I spent the summers of my childhood. Watching a landscape I knew intimately being transformed made it impossible to see environmental change as neutral. It made clear to me how uneven development and controversial infrastructure projects disrupt both human and non-human lives, and how they reflect deeper relations of power.
Political ecology felt like an intellectual home, although at the time it was barely present in Greece. Navigating academic environments with rigid disciplinary boundaries was one of the earliest challenges I faced. I knew I did not want to dilute my questions to fit comfortably within existing frameworks. Instead, I sought out spaces where critical inquiry into power, inequality and the contradictions of economic development was taken seriously, which led me to Cambridge and later to Oxford that profoundly shaped my intellectual trajectory.
Throughout my career, I have tried to challenge how environmental problems are framed. This has involved securing independent research funding and publishing in journals that shape debates in human geography and political ecology. For me, scholarship is not detached observation; it is a way of engaging with the social and political structures that shape our collective futures.
I am particularly proud of my collaborations with communities affected by environmental and social injustice. Whether researching infrastructure projects, urban transformation or marker-based environmentalism, I aim to produce research that is theoretically grounded and conducted collaboratively with communities, not simply about them.
Like many women in academia, I have navigated precarity, mobility and the often invisible labour of teaching, mentoring, doing research and caring for students, while also raising my daughter. My academic journey has been deeply meaningful, but it has not always been easy. One of the most important lessons I have learned is the value of intellectual confidence — standing firmly behind critical scholarship and insisting that questions of power, inequality and justice are central to environmental challenges, not peripheral to them.
Interdisciplinary and critical approaches are sometimes framed as “add-ons,” but they are essential to addressing complex global challenges. Environmental change is not only a technical problem to be solved; it is also a process of social transformation, and we need critical voices shaping that conversation. My advice is to seek out supportive intellectual and civil society networks, collaborate generously and never be afraid to ask difficult questions. It’s the only viable and inspiring way to open pathways to radically different, more ecologically and socially just futures.
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