About :subsistence matters: a site where I collect my work. My name is Nina Isabella Moeller and I’m Associate Professor (Lektor) at SDU’s Food Lab on urban food system transformation. From 2019-2024 I was Associate Professor of Political Ecology and People’s Knowledge in Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University.
I have worked in the Amazon since 2005 and completed my PhD at University of Lancaster (‘The Protection of Traditional Knowledge in the Ecuadorian Amazon: A Critical Ethnography of Capital Expansion‘) in 2010. My work has primarily been with Kichwa communities and federations in the Upper Napo, but I have also forged lasting relations with Shipibo community leaders in the Ucayali, Peru. After my studies I continued to work in Latin America and Europe as a consultant to indigenous federations, NGOs, and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. From 2012 to 2016 I also helped run an agroecological guest house in Ardèche, France, with a holistic focus on soil and gut health. After returning to academia I was first Independent Social Research Foundation Fellow, Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford (2016-2017), then Marie Curie Research Fellow in the School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester (2017-2019).
My research interests are (not limited to) biogenetic resource politics (especially seeds); subsistence livelihoods and agrarian change (especially in the Amazon and in bioregions of Europe, where I live and work); philosophy and politics of agroecology (especially the intersection of soil, community, individual and planetary health); climate and development finance; uneven effects of sustainability/green transitions; commoning and other property relations; epistemic colonialism; ethnographic methodology innovation; and qualitatively ‘measuring agroecology‘.
I’m also keen on herbalism, permaculture, nature-based education for children and have been involved in a variety of social, cultural and political movements since the 1990s. I’m a member of Cultivate! and on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Political Ecology. In 2023, after many years of dreaming about it, I started designing and implementing a forest garden with my extended family.