A research lab at ICTA-UAB
Senior Researcher and Ramón y Cajal Fellow
Panagiota is a senior researcher at ICTA-UAB and the PI of the 5-year ERC-CoG project (IMBRACE) which looks at what shapes immigrants’ climate health vulnerability (related to extreme heat, storms and flooding, and vector-borne disease) and how situated knowledges inform both their own response capacities and urban climate adaptation more broadly, towards more effective and just approaches. She is a biologist by training, with a Joint Master’s degree on Environmental Studies (Universidade de Aveiro, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), and a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Bonn (ZEF-Center for development Studies).
In 2016 she returned to ICTA-UAB as a Marie-Curie fellow in the ENTITLE-ITN network of political ecology, and from 2019-2023 she was also the co-PI of the H2020 WEGO-ITN (www.wegoitn.org) on feminist political ecology, contibuting a cultural and embodied understanding of socio-environmental change and health repercussions, and supervising work at the intersection of disability/crip studies and environmental justice. Through her leading role in a number of projects in BCNUEJ, she has contributed critical scholarship on urban sustainability, nature-based solutions and urban gardening documenting processes of urban nature neoliberalisation and the grassroots struggles for urban climate, enviornmental and health justice, particulalry in relation to migration and racialized groups. As a political ecologist she is interested in how the notions of ‘nature’, ‘risk’ and ‘health’ are socially constructed and driven, looking at expressions of those in water and sanitation development, urban planning, and the specific impacts of vectorborne disease and heat- and flood- related impacts. She is also a founding member of the Undisciplined Environments collective. (Languages: Eng, Cat, Spa, Greek).
Research lines:
Urban Environments, Health, and Equity
Infrastructures and Social Mobilizations for Just Urban Societies
Keywords
- Political ecologies of health
- Urban environmental justice
- Migrant health
- Biopolitics
- Urban nature
- Community gardens
- Urban adaptation
- Climate justice
Selected Publications
- Kotsila, Panagiota. 2024. “Immigrant Communities in Europe as Situated Knowledge-Holders for Postcolonial and Feminist Urban Adaptation to Climate Health Risks.” In Urban Climate Movements and the Struggles over Adaptation, Loss and Damage, edited by M. Armiero, S.P. De Rosa, and E. Turhan. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
- Kotsila, Panagiota, and Isabelle Anguelovski. “Justice should be at the centre of assessments of climate change impacts on health.” The Lancet Public Health 8.1 (2023): e11-e12.
- Apostolopoulou, Elia, and Panagiota Kotsila. “Community gardening in Hellinikon as a resistance struggle against neoliberal urbanism: spatial autogestion and the right to the city in post-crisis Athens, Greece.” Urban Geography 43.2 (2022): 293-319.
- Kotsila, Panagiota, et al. “Nature-based solutions as discursive tools and contested practices in urban nature’s neoliberalisation processes.” Environment and planning E: Nature and space 4.2 (2021): 252-274.
- Kotsila, Panagiota, et al. “Clashing temporalities of care and support as key determinants of transformatory and justice potentials in urban gardens.” Cities 106 (2020): 102865.
- Kotsila, Panagiota, and Giorgos Kallis. “Biopolitics of public health and immigration in times of crisis: The malaria epidemic in Greece (2009–2014).” Geoforum 106 (2019): 223-233.
Media Mentions
- Raval Resiliente project in El Periodico “Acorraladas por el calor en el Raval”
- El Pais (῾Olas de calor urbanas y salud: aprendiendo de la población inmigrante de El Raval en Barcelona῾)
- Què es l’ecofeminisme? (in Spanish). Interview Diari de Barcelona
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Interview on CadenaSer Podcast “Málaga no es Dubái: la lucha vecinal para preservar el horizonte sin rascacielos”