Guntra Aistara

Guntra Aistara, associate professor in the department of Environmental Sciences and Policy at the Central European University in Vienna, Austria, works at the intersection of political ecology, food sovereignty, and environmental justice. She spent over a decade working with organic farmers, seed-savers, and permaculture activists in both Latvia and Costa Rica, seeking to understand how they created their farms as places and negotiated spaces of sovereignty in the face of regionalization and globalization. Her current work looks at relational Baltic seascapes, exploring how coastal fishers’ and residents’ lives have changed in the last century in the context of shifting political regimes, fisheries management structures, and ecological change.