Sara Holmgren

My research focuses at the politics and practice of sustainability transformations. I combine analysis of the constitutive functions of communication with an experimentation with communicative methods to facilitate the articulation and emergence of new ways of seeing, being and relating.

My research interest lies in on how sustainability transformations are imagined, resisted and enacted, with a focus on land-use governance and management. I am interested in the complex interactions between global science and policy, national politics and local land use practices, and the frustrating difficulties and possibilities emerging as societies seek to transform in more sustainable directions. Methodologically, I combine critical interpretive research with explorative transdisciplinary engagement, including co-creative participatory methods, artistic interventions, and qualitative futuring. Power and knowledge are concepts key to my work in which I take inspiration from Foucault’s governmentality literature, STS and feminist theorising. 

I find the combination of critical and co-creative research methodologies inspiring as it offers research strategies that go beyond challenging existing paradigms to also rethinking, reworking and collapsing them. They offer analytical lenses that help us understand the history and workings of institutionalised structures; how actors in the present negotiate, resist and collapse structural constraints that hamper the realisation of desirable futures; and methods for opening up other futures possible.  

In addition to leading research projects and doing reserach, I regularly review articles for scientific journals, including Critical policy studies, Agriculture and Human Values, The Extractive Industries and Society, Land Use Policy, Environmental Sociology, Journal of Rural Studies, and Forest policy and Economics. 

I have a broad international research network and experience of working in inter- and transdisciplinary teams. I have extensive experience of collaborating with stakeholders with different interests, from public and private sectors at different scales. 

I regularly participate in panel discussions, organized and moderated workshops, and give lectures outside the academy in collaboration with authorities, companies, research financiers and museums