I am a food sociologist and anthropologist. In 2008, I obtained my PhD in sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Marseilles) and before that, I did my graduate studies in anthropology at the University Aix-Marseille 1 in Aix-en-Provence, including an ERASMUS year at the Università La Sapienza in Rome. I specialise in sustainable food practices, related to power, social and environmental justice, gender and identity issues as well as policy coherence and food literacy. I aim to combine a social practice approach to a dynamic systemic understanding of agri-food systems. With my interest in governmentality and changes in everyday practices within the transition towards a more circular economy, I am the principal investigator of Sustainable Food Practices, spanning Luxembourg’s foodscape from production, governance, distribution to consumption. I supervise PhD-candidates on related topics and am also involved in various projects, such as enhancing regional products in public kitchens of the Greater Region (AROMA: European INTERREG funding) or experimental research on consumer behavior in shopping premises (Goodness Groceries: public-private partnership), or in the implementation of Living Labs for sustainable food cities (FUSILLI: H2020 funding), as well as farm-level and food-system-level prospective analysis for Luxembourg (SustEATable: diverse funding among an international team, under the lead of IBLA). I am also involved in active policy work with the co-creation of a Food Policy Council for Luxembourg, as a multi-stakeholder discussion and negotiation group for more equitable food system alternatives.

 

My empirical research interest evolves in a praxeological and social-constructivist framework. It focuses on everyday, processual dynamics of (morally motivated) attributions and (ethically realised) appropriations in a dialectic of power constructions and constitutions of meaning – within Luxembourg’s food sector. The interaction between norms (e.g. from politics and expertise) on the one hand, and collective and individual identifications on the other, play a key role in the analysis of these permanently renegotiated discrepancies. I am interested in how these learning and negotiation processes operate, by which constraints and values – and generally by which cultural and social dynamics – they are governed and how they could be organised more effectively and sustainably through motive alliances. In general, I use these approaches to research the transition(s) to a low carbon post-growth society.