About :subsistence matters: a site where I collect my work. My name is Nina Isabella Moeller and I’m Associate Professor at SDU Food Lab and the Department of Business and Sustainability.
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). 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.
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.