School of Environment, Education and Development
University of Manchester
Saska is Lecturer in Human Geography at SEED and Research Co-ordinator of the Centre for Urban Resilience and Energy. She has research interests in intra-community relations and vulnerabilities as they relate to natural resource management, energy flows, social justice and local governance. Many of these themes were a crucial component of her PhD research, which she undertook at Charles University’s Faculty of Science. It involved a longitudinal investigation of the key factors shaping protected area governance and local participation in Central, Southern and Eastern Europe; her monograph on ‘Communities in transition’ (Ashgate, 2014) situates the findings of this research in the context of broader debates surrounding the relationship between nature and local people.
Some of Saska’s more recent research has focused on urban energy vulnerability and transitions, as a result of, inter alia, the involvement in a number of inter-discplinary projects: EnYA (funded by the Cheshire Lehmann Fund), ADMIER (funded by the EPRSC) and INTREACT (funded by the Higher Education Academy). Saska’s more recent work has been funded by a Royal Geographical Society-funded project on energy vulnerability and everyday practices in Greece, as a stepping stone towards a broader programme of research on domestic energy deprivation in the Mediterranean region.
Saska has often entered into a dialogue with urban political ecology and environmental governance, resulting in publications in journals such as Geoforum, Environment and Planning A, Urban Studies, Environmental Education Research, Area, Geojournal and Energy Policy. She also has an extensive professional background as a public advocate and consultant for a range of global government institutions and think tanks, including the task force of the Regional Environmental Reconstruction Programme for South East Europe.
Saska can be contacted at saska.petrova (at) manchester.ac.uk. Her Manchester University staff page can be found here.
An archive of Saska’s posts on this website can be accessed through this link.
People and Energy Collective 