Student Election 2017

Student Representative – Candidates

This year the terms of office of our Student Representative is ending after 3 years. According to the ESEE Constitution, the ESEE Board can consist of up to two Student Representatives. The candidates for ESEE 2017 elections are:

Sarah Hafner

PhD Candidate, The Global Sustainability Institute (GSI), Cambridge, UK

Short Bio and Motivation

I am a PhD student at the Global Sustainability Institute (GSI) in Cambridge (UK). My PhD research is part of the Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) and builds a system dynamics model of the UK economy to investigate policies to “green” the UK energy supply sector. Additionally, my PhD analyses the implications of certain assumptions of neoclassical economic theory (e.g. the notion of equilibrium, or rational agents) on policy formation.

Prior to my position at the GSI, I have completed a Masters in system dynamics in Norway (University of Bergen), where my thesis investigated the role of technological change on abatement costs for greenhouse gas mitigation. I also hold a Master’s degree in economics (from the University of Konstanz, Germany), and worked for two years as a researcher at the Swiss Statistical Office, where I was part of the internal review team for the Consumer Price Index. My main research interests include ecological economics, post-keynesian economics and other “heterodox“ economics schools of thought, sustainable development, climate finance and system dynamics modelling.

Since my participation at the Oxford Summer School in Ecological Economics in 2016, I consider ecological economics as my scholarly home. Ecological economics has strongly influenced my thinking about the economy, and my PhD aims to contribute to this very interesting research field. Therefore, I would be delighted to volunteer as a student representative on the board of the Society Ecological Economics in Europe and to influence its direction.

Ernest Aigner

PhD Candidate, Department of Socioeconomics, WU, Vienna, AT.

Short Bio and Motivation:

I am a doctorate student at the Institute for Ecological Economics at the Vienna University of Business and Economics. My interests include social, ecological and political-economic concerns and the role of heterodoxy in the economic discipline, environmental concerns in work policy and technology-money interactions. Currently I work as a project assistant on paradigmatic orientations in the economic discipline at WU. Prior to that, I studied Socio-Ecological Economics and Policy, where I explored the relations of urban agriculture and racialized capital accumulation in Detroit in my master thesis. I also published working papers on ‘Climate and labour market policies in Sweden’ as well as ‘Pluralism in the Market of Science?’; planned, facilitated and taught in the course ‘The Global Economy – Globalization, Development and Environment’ at Uppsala University in Sweden; and contributed to a systemic literature review on synergies and trade-offs between social and environmental outcomes in biodiversity conservation at the WWF-US in Washington, DC, US.

The first time I attended the ESEE conference was about six years ago. Back then, I was inspired by the links between theory and practice and the variety of approaches to address social ecological concerns in research. Recent attempts to integrate social theory in discussing environmental transformations seems a fruitful future route to me. Moreover, I experienced the community as very open for young people, an aspect I would like to strengthen in my work as a student representative.