Research Fellow
Academic Researcher and Architectural Investigator
With a PhD in Ecological Economics from the UK, Sandrine Simon focuses on interdisciplinary approaches of issues such as sustainable cities and societies, participatory governance and territorial-social learning, environmental policy-making tools and circular economy principles, and reforms in Education for Sustainability (EfS). She is a strong advocate of participatory approaches. Based at the CeiED at Lusófona University, she is doing her second PhD on urban agriculture and territorial education in Lisbon, for which she has published 5 articles in peer-reviewed journals (Current Issues in Comparative Education, World Journal of Educational Research, Systemic Practice and Action Research, Educação, Sociedade e Culturas, and the Journal of Urban Governance). The final of piece of research on an online urban participatory governance platform will be documented in an article in Journal of Urban Technology and the reflection on the learning emerging from the use of the tool will be written in an article for the Journal of ICTS and Human Development. Together with two colleagues from the CeiED, Sandrine also designed a postgraduate module entitled ¿Education and Arts for Global citizenship and Sustainability¿ (July 2022), from which an article was submitted to the journal Frontiers in Education. In addition, this work will be extended through a COST proposal on Arts, Citizenship and Sustainability. In autumn 2022, she co-chaired an international conference at the university of Lusofona entitled 'Back to human scale- rethinking living spaces for tomorrow'. Prior to her work at Lusófona, Sandrine carried out research a project on cultural heritage and natural resource (water) management in Morocco and published two books on that research (one with L'Harmattan, Paris (in 2020) and one with Routledge, London (in 2021). She also worked and published on women's emancipation and ICTs in Morocco. Of French nationality, she spent more than 25 years in the UK and 11 years in North Africa. She has experience in research as well as in teaching including designing undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and supervising masters and PhD students. Besides working at university, she also has experience in teaching in French Cultural Centres abroad, secondary schools and also worked for the London NGO Forum for the Future. Her current work on the online participatory platform will involve PhD students but also non academic partners in a workshop. Her second PhD that she is currently finishing focuses on the area of territorial education, participatory urbanism and urban agriculture, with a particular focus on vulnerabilities that emerged from the current pandemic. These include food insecurity, the difficulty in enhancing participation when social distancing is necessary, and the weaknesses of the educational and professional training system in equipping stakeholders with the skills that are necessary to operationalise sustainability. To do so, her lines of action include research on how urban agricultural initiatives can help cities become more food autonomous; how to develop appropriate social urbanism online platforms; and how new forms of education, based on experiential and social learning, can help to make 'sustainability' more relevant to people's private lives and needs, whilst respecting the global citizenship UNESCO principles that are universally shared. Her current focus is on developing a participatory online urban governance platform for stakeholders involved in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area food system. Her professional guiding principles therefore include strategic publishing, field work with non-academic partners as well as international networking to extend the network of knowledge necessary to make societal transformations realistic, responding to people¿s needs and also, hopefully, more humane.
Complete CV
