Lara Monticelli

Lara Monticelli is Assistant Professor and Marie Curie fellow at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. Prior to this, Lara worked for two years as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy). The research she conducted during her post-doc was focusing on the study of political engagement among young precarious workers, combining perspectives from the sociology of work, social movement, and political participation studies.

Her ongoing Marie Skłodowska-Curie project (2018-2021), titled ‘EcoLabSS – Ecovillages as Laboratories of Sustainability and Social Change’, focuses on the emergence of community-based, prefigurative social movements (e.g. sustainable communities, eco-villages, transition towns, solidarity networks, autonomous zones) as living laboratories experimenting with practices of resilience and resistance to environmental, economic and societal challenges. Lara is especially interested in how these movements re-politicize and re-configure everyday life, thus representing radical attempts to embody a critique to contemporary capitalism and prefigure alternative and sustainable futures. More in general, Lara´s current research agenda aims at crossing perspectives from social movement studies, critical social theory and political ecology to come forth with an original contribution for the study of contemporary capitalism and its alternatives. Lara is also involved in a number of parallel research projects in collaboration with non-governmental organizations like the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) and ECOLISE – the European Network for Community Led Initiatives on Climate Change and Sustainability.

Since 2017, she is the co-founder and co-chair of the SASE research network I: ‘Alternatives to Capitalism’. She is also affiliated researcher at the CoresNet research network for the study of consumption networks and practices of sustainable economies and a member of the researcher collective “Women on the Verge” that gathers female scholar-activists from Australia, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, the UK and the USA.

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