Esther Veen is lector Urban Food Issues at Aeres University of Applied Sciences in Almere. Esther studied International Development Studies at Wageningen University (BSc and MSc) and after working for a not-for-profit consultancy firm she returned to Wageningen University and Research. She did so as an applied researcher, studying multifunctional agriculture and urban agriculture. After a year in that position, Esther started a PhD project as part of and alongside that job, studying to what extent community gardens can be seen as alternative food networks and whether they promote social cohesion. In 2015 Esther successfully defended her PhD thesis and then started working as an Assistant Professor at the Rural Sociology Group of Wageningen University. She taught courses on foodscapes, food and identity and alternative food networks, studied food sharing, prosumption and greening cities, and was engaged in several Science Shop projects. In 2021 she started working in her current position, where she studies food routines around shopping, cooking and eating, and works with students and research institute Flevo Campus. Esther has published in various scientific journals such as Sociologia Ruralis, Sustainability, Urban agriculture & regional food systems, Food and Foodways, Nature and Culture and Journal of Urbanism. She also likes to share her work in professional journals or blogs
Petr Jehlička is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Science (CAS), Prague. Petr holds a degree in geography from Charles University, Prague and a PhD in social and political sciences from Cambridge University. At the beginning of his career, he held a postdoctoral Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence. Prior to joining the CAS in 2020, he spent two decades at the Department of Geography of the Open University in the UK where he was a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Environmental Geography. In the last decade his research has focused on urban agriculture and other forms of food relocalisation, informal food economies and the implications of these practices for social resilience, food security and environmental sustainability. Most recently this has led to the interest in the geopolitics of knowledge production and context-dependent hierarchies of knowledge claims. The outcomes of his research were published as book chapters (including the 2021 Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies), and articles in journals including Progress in Human Geography, Sociologia Ruralis, Journal of Rural Studies, Political Geography, Geoforum and Local Environment. For open access to these publications visit https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Petr-Jehlicka-2/research.
