current position
I currently serve as The Arctic Six Chair (2024–2026) of Arctic Food Citizenship and live and work as a settler in Ubmeje Sápmi, where I investigate how Traditional Knowledges, food practices, and cultures in the Circumpolar North can contribute to reimagining Environmental Citizenship.
I hold dual full professorships: in Design for Sustainability at Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden, and in Sustainability Transitions at the Department of Business and Sustainability, University of Southern Denmark (SDU) in Kolding, where I am part of the MERE research group focused on food system transformation.
My research examines how embodied ways of knowing, being, and imagining can support collaborative responses to complex challenges at the intersection of situated practice, governance, and more-than-human justice in sustainability transitions. I integrate ecological imaginaries, policy engagement, and collective inquiry to inform transformative, context-sensitive approaches to global challenges. Grounded in feminist and intersectional theories, my work uses participatory Research through Design to co-create alternative futures in collaboration with First Peoples, non-Indigenous actors, and more-than-human partners.
Working from a foundation in design research, I collaborate with diverse societal stakeholders — including public authorities, civil society actors, and non-human others — through food living labs that enable situated, co-creative action. These labs serve as platforms for developing transition roadmaps, advancing radically open citizen science, and supporting embodied, participatory approaches to more-than-human health and environmental citizenship.
I collaborate across disciplines with researchers in science and technology studies, human geography, governance, health systems, food studies, molecular biology, and environmental and business economics.
My current research investigates:
- food as a methodology for thinking
- biology as materiality
- critical, embodied, participatory research-through-design
- radically open, co-creative citizen science
- enriched science society interfaces
- design+diversity | ethics+aesthetics across materials, bodies, contexts, and perspectives.
- situated sustainability transitions
- more-than-only-human health
- multispecies flourishing
To support this research, I lead the Sympoietic Collaboratory for making with food and cultures, in Umeå, and FoodLab, in Kolding, a space for co-creation and experimentation around food system transformation, developed for the FUSILLI project.
In parallel to my work in Sweden and Denmark, I serve on a number of international advisory boards; am a member of the Academic Council at the Estonian Academy of Art Doctoral School; represent Denmark on the committee of the European Network for Environmental Citizenship COST Action 16229; and am on the editorial board of She-Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics and Innovation.
research concerns
My work spans systemic, situated, and collaborative research concerns; design & policy; post-disciplinary collaboration; more-than-only-human health and wellbeing; and transformative change-making. Key concerns include:
- building resilient and regenerative futures
- situated and systemic food system transformation
- participatory research through designing
- co-creation and collaborative imagining
- magical thinking and making strange
- emergent performativity
- convergence
- poetics and
- play
broad aims:
To prompt a reappraisal of human-nature relationships towards multispecies flourishing, across socially, ecologically and environmentally evolving landscapes, at personal, local and global scales of action. In particular:
- using food to develop future imaginaries
- exploring divergent thinking, abilities, bodies, values and expressions
- divergent personal, social, political, ethical and ecological concerns
- the roles that creativity, art, design, performance and DIY-practices might play when engaging with material, technological and biological processes
- how designing and living might evolve to be personally, locally and globally sustainable for all
other activities:
For (occasionally updated) research activities, see: wilde news
From a personal perspective, I moved to the Arctic region of Sweden in March 2022. It has been a revelation. As an Australian in Europe, I have always missed large skies and omnipresent nature. Umeå has these things and more. Lovely people, a vibrant restaurant scene, stunning nature, a world-class academic environment, and a relaxed pace of life. I am excited to be building my research here.
I moved to Kolding, Denmark (from Australia) in December 2014, to work at SDU. For seven years, I was situated in a cross-faculty research group, working from Engineering, initially, then from the Humanities. In 2021, I joined the MERE research group , in Social Sciences, to engage with Environmental Economics and food systems transitions. This move has enabled me to broaden my understanding of how to develop impactful artistic research that speaks to diverse listenings.
Before moving to Denmark I donated my electronics to Media Lab Melbourne, my circus equipment (via Anni Davey of Circus Oz) to Sosina Wogayehu’s GAMO Circus School of Ethiopia, and my Japanese fabrics and sewing bits and pieces to the fabulous Tania Spława-Neyman, to glean or give away. I then rode my (at the time) brand-new BMW G650GS motorbike around and up the centre of Australia (2,000km/7days around Tasmania learning how to ride, then 26,000km/83 days around the mainland). I finished the trip having had my bike and licence for less than a year, fundamentally changed by the process. A patchy blog account is here: grrrrty.wordpress.com. The pink lines on the map show the journey:
In Europe, I’ve done nine motorbike tours so far, on a F700GS: a Kolding-Weimar-Pottsdam loop in 2015; a Nordic-Baltic loop in 2016; the Alps, via Germany: 6 countries and 30 Alpine passes, in 2017; Scotland, the Pennines, the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales (via Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium), in 2018; the Spanish Pyrenees and some Alpine passes in Switzerland, in 2019; in 2020, we did the Harz Mountains, Luxumbourg and the Ardennes, Belgium, which led us to discover the joys of Luxemourg. We returned to Luxumbourg and the Mosel Valley in Summer 2021. In 2022, I had a broken foot, so my motorbike touring took a pause. Summer, 2023, we returned to Luxembourg again. In 2024, we explored the DOlomits a little more closely, in Italy, Slovenia and the edges of the Czech Republic. Our 2025 trip is to Wales, with the South of Engliand, the South of Scotland and – time permitting – the Atlantic Way in Ireland.
