RESEARCH FOCUS

My research sits at the intersection of ethnobiology and human ecology and examines how communities gather, cook, heal with, and value plants amid rapid social and environmental change. It is organised around four thematic axes, pursued across a shared set of study areas.

1. Foraging and foragers

Ethnobiological documentation of gathered plants, fungi and animal products, and of how gathering practices are learned, transmitted, contracted or abandoned. Alongside inherited local knowledge, this axis addresses neo-foraging — the contemporary re-invention of wild food gathering by urban and peri-urban publics, driven by chefs, courses, social media and guidebooks rather than by household provisioning — and its uses in environmental education, where foraging serves as a pedagogical device for plant literacy, place attachment and awareness of local biodiversity. It also addresses the attendant risks: misidentification, over-harvesting, and the romanticisation of "tradition".

Keywords: ethnobiology · foraging · neo-foraging · wild food plants · herbal remedies · local knowledge · environmental education

2. Human ecology and adaptation to socio-environmental change

How communities reconfigure their relationship with local environments under depopulation, land abandonment, rewilding, border shifts, market integration and climate pressure. Read through a socio-ecological systems lens, with resilience and the erosion or retention of environmental knowledge as the central questions.

Keywords: human ecology · socio-ecological systems · adaptation · resilience · biocultural diversity

3. Migrants' food systems and domestic food-medicines

Foodways and plant knowledge in diaspora: transnational supply chains for "home" ingredients, the substitution and re-identification of taxa in the host flora, and the role of food in renegotiating identity in Western urban spaces. The axis centres on the food–medicine continuum as it operates within the migrant household — domestic preparations such as infusions, soups, syrups, poultices, ferments and preserves that are simultaneously nourishment and remedy, largely transmitted between women and across generations, and mobilised alongside rather than against biomedical care in the host country.

Keywords: migration · foodways · transnationalism · food–medicine continuum · domestic food-medicines · home remedies · urban ethnobiology

4. Food heritage and gastronomy

Processes of heritage-making around local products, dishes and gathering traditions: who decides what becomes "heritage", how designation schemes and gastronomic tourism reshape everyday practice, and the tension between safeguarding and commodifying biocultural diversity.

Keywords: food heritage · gastronomy · heritagisation · biocultural diversity · local products

Study areas

Mediterranean · Alps · Balkans · Eastern Europe · Middle East and its fringes (Caucasus, Hindu Kush) · Western urban spaces