Consortium

Project manager Dr Arne Dulsrud.  is a research professor at SIFO. He has coordinated several national and international research project over the last 20 years. PLATEFORMS, a preceding ERA-project to the DISCo project which finished in 2020, produced in-depth knowledge on how food practices are affected by socio-technical innovations such as digital platforms in food provisioning and to what degree they represent new opportunities to promote sustainable food practices. He has broad managerial skills as the previous institute director of SIFO (2008-20014) and Head of Research (2015-2022), expert and evaluator in national and international panels. He has many years of experience as a researcher in food markets and food security and is currently coordinating SEGURA, a project on food security and conflict in Colombia funded by the Research Council of Norway.

Dr. Torvald Tangeland is the head of research for the Youth Research Section at NOVA, OsloMet. Prior to working at NOVA he held the position of head of research for the Technology and Sustainability group at SIFO. Torvald has a master’s degree in marketing management from BI School of Business and a doctorate in nature-based tourism from NMBU. In his PhD, he focused on choice and purchase decisions among consumers. In recent years, a central focus of his work has been on the role consumers can play in the green shift of society and how new technology and social innovations can contribute to reducing the negative climate and environmental impacts of consumption.

Live Bøyum is a PhD candidate at SIFO and works in the Technology and Sustainability research group. Her doctoral research focuses on investigating why people travel the way they do in their daily lives and identifying the main barriers they face when choosing green mobility. Based on this research, she aims to discuss and propose effective policies to foster more sustainable mobility practices. Live works with both quantitative and qualitative data.

Dr. Marie Hebrok is a research professor at SIFO. She is interested in the relationships between design and sustainable consumption practices. Hebrok is currently leading the RCN funded project REDUCE – rethinking everyday plastics. Her recent work has revolved around food practices and product durability. 

Karina Wethal is a Senior Research Adviser at SIFO. She will act as the administrative project manager of the DISCo project.

Dr. Manisha Anantharaman is an Assistant Professor at the Center for the Sociology of Organisations at Sciences Po in Paris. She is a multi-disciplinary scholar who combines critical theory with participatory and ethnographic methods to explore the politics of the ecological transition. Her research focuses on how economic and political ideologies, socio-cultural identities, and power relations impact how “environmentalism” and “sustainability” are conceptualized and enacted at multiple scales and by diverse actors – from the household, to the city, to the transnational milieu, with specific attention to whether environmental initiatives reinforce or dismantle different manifestations of race, class, gender, and caste-based inequality. Anantharaman holds a PhD from the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management at the University of California Berkeley.

Dr. Jennifer Heung is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology at Saint Mary’s College of California, and an Associate Provost of Faculty Affairs. She holds a PhD from the University of California.

Dr. Noemi Linares-Ramirez is a postdoc in the DISCo project and works at Saint Mary’s College of California. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Christian Fuentes is a Professor of Marketing and Consumption at the Department of Service Studies, Lund University, Sweden. His research explores the interrelationships of consumption, markets, and society. Drawing on and combining economic sociology, STS, and practice theory he has explored how devices, technologies, and infrastructures shape consumption, marketing work, and the organization of markets. Methodologically, his expertise lies in ethnographic research and he has designed, conducted, and led numerous ethnographic studies. Previous projects include research into digital platforms and sustainable food consumption, the digitalization of ethical consumption, alternative food markets, mobile shopping, and sustainable retailing.

Dr. Maria Fuentes is a Professor and a Senior lecturer at the Department of Service Studies at Lund University. Her research focuses on consumer practices related to food, risk and retail. She is currently involved in a project funded by FORMAS, examining alternative food markets: promoting new modes of food provisioning and consumption.

Dr. Emma Samsioe is an Associate Senior lecturer at the Department of Service Studies at Lund University. She specializes in research on consumer learning and competences, and her work focuses on how consumers use different practices to make sense of market offerings in transformative retail environments.

Emmelina Eriksson is a Project Assistant at the Department of Service Studies at Lund University. She has a MSc in Sustainable Service Management from Lund University. Her thesis explored how energy consuming household practices changed due to the European energy crisis of 2022/23 and her main research interest lies within the field of sustainable consumption and how change in unsustainable consumption practices can be initiated and sustained.

Dr. Yusuke Kishita is an Associate Professor at the Department of Precision Engineering at the University of Tokyo. Kishita is head of the Kishita lab and an expert in life cycle analysis. He holds MSc and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Osaka University. He has been appointed as one of The University of Tokyo Excellent Young Researchers in 2017.

Christian Clemm is a project academic specialist at the University of Tokyo. He holds a double Master’s degree in environmental sciences from the Universities of Copenhagen and Hohenheim. His research focus has been on life cycle assessment and ecodesign of electronic equipment while working at the Technische Universität Berlin and Fraunhofer IZM for several years. His research interest within the DISCo project is on better understanding the role of consumers in the environmental sustainability of sharing economy practices. Concurrently, he is a visiting researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and acts as research consultant to the United Nations Institute for Teaching and Research (UNITAR).

Tatsuki Watanabe is a Master’s student at the University of Tokyo. He majored in mechanical engineering as an undergraduate and conducted research on image analysis for his thesis. He is now a student at the Graduate School of Engineering, majoring in precision engineering and conducting research within the DISCo project with a particular interest in consumer behavior within platform-enabled shared economy businesses.

Dr. Aykut Coşkun is an Associate Professor of design at Koc University’s Media and Visual Arts Department. He is also a council member of Koc University Social Impact Forum (KUSIF), a research and practice center on social impact which was established to foster social innovation through research, education and collaboration. His current research focuses on design for behavioral change, design for sustainability, and design for well-being. He has been working in various international (H2020) and national grants (TUBITAK) as the principal investigator and researcher.