FORAGE is coordinated by dr. Jodie Asselin, dr. Agata A. Konczal, and dr. Irene van Oorschot.

// dr. Jodie Asselin is an associate professor of environmental anthropology at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. Her research focuses on the intersection of rural culture and resource extraction in the Global North, often by examining forest politics and rural livelihoods.

Her work focuses on applying qualitative methods and theories to pressing contemporary environmental problems and foregrounding the importance of rural voices in resource decision making. Key publications include Plantation Politics and Discourse: Forests and Property in Upland Ireland, and The Discursive Context of Forest in Land Use Documents. Her manuscript, Troublesome Ground: Farming Forests and Green Policy in Rural Ireland, with University Colorado Press is expected to be released in 2025. In 2025 Dr. Asselin she was a research fellow at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, she current holds a SSHRC Insight Development Grant that examines the cultural role of forests in Irish rural landscapes, and contributes to a number of Canadian rural resource-oriented research projects. Dr. Asselin is also a board member of the Parkland Institute, an Alberta-wide non-partisan research center and co-runs the Community Bridge Lab, a collaborative research space for qualitative and community-engaged research.

// dr. Agata A. Konczal is an Assistant Professor at the Wageningen University, in Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group. Before joining Wageningen University in 2022, she was a researcher at the European Forest Institute, where she led the European Forest Governance and Society Team.

She has a background in humanities and social science and holds a PhD
in social and cultural anthropology. Her specialisation lies in environmental anthropology,
political ecology, environmental history. Agata’s main research interests are studies on
perception, understanding and use of forests by different social groups, various approaches
to, and interpretations of nature protection (e.g. within rewilding projects), and
interdisciplinary research relating to forest and environmental topics. In her current research, Agata examines how forests are increasingly politicised as easy solutions for climate change, biodiversity, rural areas, and development issues. Her research delves into diverse perspectives and strategies for addressing the “forest crisis” within the wider scope of climate change and the uncertain future of forests. This includes the exploration of different framings of forest disturbance and restoration, and the role of diverse social and cultural values in forest and nature management. She can be reached at agata.konczal [at] wur.nl.

// dr. Irene van Oorschot is assistant professor in sociology in the Public Issues and Imaginaries team at the Erasmus School for Social and Behavioral Research (ESSB), at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Informed by Science and Technology Studies and Valuation Studies, she has ethnographically explored how various professionals and organizations navigate increasingly complex and controversial value conflicts, ranging from settings like criminal law, forensic practice, and currently, to environmental managers and forestry professionals. She is especially interested in how the concept and horizon of resilience reconfigures notions of environmental and forest value. Key publications include The Law Multiple: Judgment and Knowledge in Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2021), The Politics of Face and the Trouble with Race, an edited special issue (together with Prof. A. M’charek) for the journal Social Studies of Science (2023), and her recent contribution to the study of future-making in practices of afforestation in the Dutch context, Forest Futures in the Making: Legal Infrastructures and Multispecies Speculation in Planning Climate-Adaptable Forests (2024, Tecnoscienza). She can be reached at vanoorschot [at] essb.eur.nl.