Panagiota KotsilaAutonomous University of Barcelona | UAB · Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies (ICTA)
Panagiota Kotsila
PhD
Researching on feminist and just climate health adaptation in cities with a focus on immigrant groups.
@bcnuej @UndiEnvi
About
34
Publications
7,035
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610
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies (ICTA - UAB) and the Barcelona Laboratory for Urban Environmental justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ). I am a core editor in https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/ and a member of the WEGO network on Feminist Political Ecology.
Additional affiliations
April 2017 - present
July 2014 - May 2016
Publications
Publications (34)
This article examines the discourses, politics, and everyday practices shaping the implementation of water supply and sanitation (WSS) development programs in Vietnam. Biopolitics is used as a theoretical framework to demonstrate how these programs can constitute tools of governance and forms of domination, independent of their success or failure....
That crisis and austerity have a negative effect on public health is well documented. Less attention has been paid on the explosive combination of crisis with xenophobia and the ways racist policies and discourses produce vulnerable bodies, blamed then for their own disease. We study here the 2009 outbreak of malaria in the Evrotas region of Pelopo...
‘Nature-based solutions’ is the new jargon used to promote ideas of urban sustainability, which is gaining traction in both academic and policy circles, especially in the European Union. Through an analysis of the definitions and discourse around nature-based solutions, we discern a number of assumptions stemming from positivist science that are em...
Urban gardens, consolidating spaces as new urban commons, are faced with the contradiction and challenge of being embedded in neoliberal landscapes of urban governance. While their transformative and justice potential has often, and rightly, been celebrated –offering new pathways towards food security and sovereignty; serving social empowerment and...
Questions of dam safety and hazard potential most often do not take center-stage in contestations and articulations concerning large dams. Through a comparative study of two of Europe’s most emblematic dam disasters – Vajont (Italy) and Ribadelago (Spain) – and the ongoing conflict over the safety of the Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project in Nor...
In this chapter, we set out the book’s engagements with feminist political ecology (FPE) theory and practice. We first position the book in relation to FPE discussions underlying how the field is evolving as an open-ended set of discourses responding to the different crises and disruptions caused by the last years of environmental, climate, health,...
In this chapter, we bring political ecologies of health and the body into conversation with environmental justice and crip theory, science, technology and society studies (STS) and biopolitics. We present a trialogue that highlights three cases of health and embodiment examining the crosscutting themes of porosity and technologies as they offer us...
In this chapter, we share the insights of feminist political ecology (FPE) for degrowth, building from the debates on “caring communities for radical change” at the 8th International Degrowth Conference in August 2021. We discuss how FPE links to the principles of degrowth as an academic and activist movement and why it is necessary to take feminis...
This book uses a unique typology of ten core drivers of injustice to explore and question common assumptions around what urban sustainability means, how it can be implemented, and how it is manifested in or driven by urban interventions that hinge on claims of sustainability.
Aligned with critical environmental justice studies, the book highlights...
Traditional interventions to "bring nature into the city" were often motivated by a concern to create forms of public space which would provide a public good. Despite such well-intentioned motivations, these public forms of urban nature have always been to some extent bounded, serving some in favor of others, authorizing particular uses and forms o...
Urban sustainability has often been accused of tending mostly to its environmental and economic dimensions, neglecting or marginalising issues of justice. Simultaneously, the European Union has been increasingly funding research explicitly focused on the intersection of justice, sustainability and the city. The role of such research in furthering o...
As global cities grapple with the increasing challenge of gentrification and displacement, research in public health and urban geography has presented growing evidence about the negative impacts of those unequal urban changes on the health of historically marginalized groups. Yet, to date comprehensive research about the variety of health impacts a...
West Nile Virus (WNV) has recently emerged as a major public health concern in Europe; its recent expansion also coincided with some remarkable socio-economic and environmental changes, including an economic crisis and some of the warmest temperatures on record. Here we empirically investigate the drivers of this phenomenon at a European wide scale...
On the one hand the Special Issue provides a diagnosis of the justice implications embedded in recent efforts to renature cities. Placed in the breadth of existing scholarship, it aims to explore the type of socio-environmental contradictions and contestations emerging through the deployment of nature-based solutions in a range of geographies. On t...
West Nile Virus (WNV) has recently emerged as a major public health concern in Europe, its recent expansion also coincided with some remarkable socioeconomic and environmental changes, including an economic crisis and some of the warmest temperatures on record. Here we empirically investigate the drivers for this phenomenon at a European wide scale...
West Nile Virus (WNV) has recently emerged as a major public health concern in Europe, its recent expansion also coincided with some remarkable socio-economic and environmental changes, including an economic crisis and some of the warmest temperatures on record. Here we empirically investigate the drivers for this phenomenon at a European wide scal...
In this paper, we aim to explore how community gardening can embed and foment grassroots resistance to the privatization of urban space in the current configuration of a prolonged socio-economic and ecological crisis in European cities. We focus on the emblematic case of the Hellinikon self-organized garden; a case of guerrilla gardening that emerg...
The manifold social, cultural and health benefits of urban community gardens have received much attention in the literature on urban ecosystem services and nature-based solutions off late. Despite recognition of these benefits by many city governments, critical scholarship in urban political ecology has, however, also shown that urban community gar...
Background
This study examines the impact of climate, socio-economic and demographic factors on the incidence of dengue in regions of the United States and Mexico. We select factors shown to predict dengue at a local level and test whether the association can be generalized to the regional or state level. In addition, we assess how different indica...
Hybrid (or multi-actor) governance has been identified as a key opportunity for upscaling urban nature-based solutions (referred to as urban NBS), representing a demand-driven and cost-effective realization of urban green infrastructure. However it is unclear how such hybrid governance affects the justice outcomes of urban NBS. Through six in-depth...
Planetary urbanization exacerbates the spread of infectious disease and the emergence of pandemics. As COVID-19 cases continue to swell in cities around the world, the pandemic has visibilized urban health inequities. In the Global North, emerging trends show that lower income residents are often at greater risk for infection and death due to COVID...
Background: Dengue is one of the important vector-borne diseases in the world today; it infects tens of millions of people each year and has been on the rise since the 1950s. In this study, we develop a set of indicators that help us examine the impact of socio-economic and demographic factors on the occurrence of dengue in regions of the United St...
Supported by a large body of scholarship, it is increasingly orthodox practice for cities to deploy urban greening interventions to address diverse socioenvironmental challenges, from protecting urban ecosystems to enhancing built environments and climate resilience or improving health outcomes. In this article, we expand the theoretical boundaries...
In global cities, the impacts of gentrification on the lives and well-being of socially vulnerable residents have occupied political agendas. Yet to date, research on how gentrification affects a multiplicity of health outcomes has remained scarce. While much of the nascent quantitative research helps to identify associations between gentrification...
Three researchers share their thoughts about a roundtable discussion on “Emotional Political Ecologies” during the ENTITLE Undisciplined Environments Conference, held in Stockholm from 20 to 24 March 2016. The roundtable participants – Christos Zografos (chair), Neera Singh, Andrea Nightingale and Marien González Hidalgo – discussed the main outcom...
Despite the swift development of Vietnam's water supply and sanitation (wat/san) sector, over the last ten years there have been 1.5 million annual documented cases of diarrhea. Western perspectives blame insufficient medical or economic advancement for failing to prevent diarrhea and its treatment, failing to grasp how disease is shaped in the cul...
Political ecology has, in the past decade, emerged as an increasingly accepted framework for studying issues of health and disease and has thus given rise to a distinct sub-field: the political ecologies of health and disease (PEHD). More recently, scholars have suggested more specific avenues through which the sub-field can be further developed an...
We believe that this publication will be a useful tool for civil society organizations. While there are multiple books on political ecology, all of them are oriented towards an academic audience, either as introductory textbooks (Robbins, 2012) or as comprehensive or partial compilations of state-of-the-art theory and research in the field.
This book examines the cultural, social, environmental, and political factors that shape the spread of diarrhea in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. Social inequalities, the dominance of state-led discourse, and the lack of participatory health education, all contribute to a persistently high incidence of disease. The case of the Mekong Delta shows why the s...
Projects
Projects (8)
WEGO’s first aim is to establish a vibrant European network of excellence on FEMINIST POLITICAL ECOLOGY that will link researchers, communities and policy makers for maximum impact in the environment and development policy arena, and positive change for the communities involved in the research.
Led by Durham University, NATURVATION involves 14 institutions across Europe working in fields as diverse as urban development, innovation studies, geography, ecology, environmental assessment and economics. Our partnership includes city governments, non-governmental organisations and business. We will assess what nature-based solutions can achieve in cities, examine how innovation is taking place, and work with communities and stakeholders to develop the knowledge and tools required to realise the potential of nature-based solutions for meeting urban sustainability goals.
