Andrea Mathez

After 10 years of studying, working, and living in 7 countries in three continents, I have started my position as a Graduate Assistant-PhD in the Institute of Geography and Sustainability (IGD) of the University of Lausanne, under the supervision of Christian Kull.

My doctoral research focuses on 'alternative agricultures' in Switzerland and Morocco - forms of peasant agro-ecology that have persisted or emerged outside of agricultural planning and state control - with the idea that these forms of agriculture contain within them answers to one or more of the problems generated by agrobusiness and agroindustry. I mobilize Ernst Bloch's concept of Concrete Utopia(s) and a Community Economies perspective in order to explore the extent to which these spaces of experimentation and survival carry within them the seeds for imagining and implementing socially more just and ecologically more viable agri-food futures. To do so, I focus on the multiple dimensions – economic, political, historic, cultural, socio-ecological and emotional – that (re)make peasant experiences, experiments and struggles in these two countries.

At the IGD, I also coordinate the Agroecology Initiative.

Before joining the IGD, I worked as assistant of the president of the Campus de la Transition in France, and as teaching assistant for the class - What ethics for the ecological transition - tought by Cécile Renouard at Sciences Po Paris. I also worked on the institutionalisation and the discourses of pastoralism at the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) in Rome and Dakar, and on local food circuits for the International Urban Food Network (IUFN) in France.

I hold a Bachelor in Socioeconomics from the University of Geneva, a Masters in International Development, specialisation in agriculture from Sciences Po Paris and a Masters in Globalisation, Environment and Politics from King's College London. I also studied Arabic at the School of Governance and Economics in Rabat, Morocco.