Filka
Sekulova

Filka Sekulova is a social environmental scientist working at the intersection of social sciences and heterodox economics. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and a member of the Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). As of 2022 she now coordinates the governance research being carried out under the COOLSCHOOLS ERA-NET Cofund Urban Transformation Capacities (ENUTC) project. She is also a founding member of the academic think tank Research & Degrowth and part of the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Her research takes place in the fields of ecological and happiness economics, and urban and critical tourism studies. Her primary focus is on urban greening, where she critically examines the effectiveness and equity aspects of nature-based solutions as purported responses to key sustainability challenges. A second major focus of her work concerns the processes, dynamics and factors that drive and prefigure degrowth-inspired societal transformation in the Global North. In this field, she explores the relationship between (human) well-being and the politics and practices associated with degrowth (such as a universal basic income, or consumption reduction in the middle/upper classes). Her third research focus deals with community-based organization towards sustainability and the emergence and persistence of bottom-up initiatives as experimental spaces for sharing, learning, unlearning and transformation that embody the elements of larger systemic change. Filka earned a PhD in climate change economics and happiness from the UAB in 2013. She previously received a master's degree in Environmental and Transport Economics from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She also holds two bachelor's degrees, one in Psychology from Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" in Bulgaria and another in Economics and Business from Universiteit van Amsterdam in the Netherlands.