Contact: avansintjan@gmail.com
Short Bio
Aaron holds an MSc in Natural Resource Sciences from McGill University (2015) and a BA in Philosophy with a Minor in Environment from McGill University (2012). Broadly, his research focuses on cities, food, and environmental justice. His MSc thesis focused on food banks as a cost-shifting strategy of the food industry, drawing on the work of economists such as K. William Kapp and Joan Martinez-Alier. He is a PhD candidate at the University of London, Birkbeck, co-supervised by Isabelle Anguelovski at ICTA-UAB. He is investigating the effect of gentrification on food access of marginalized communities, and how people may use food to resist or challenge development narratives. As such, his PhD research draws on the fields of urban geography, comparative urbanism, political ecology, ecological economics, and food studies. Other interests include degrowth policy, social ecology, political theory, science fiction, and environmental thought. Aaron is a co-editor at Uneven Earth, an environmental politics website, and his work has been published in several online media.
Selected publications
- Vansintjan, A. Nguyen H. V., Nguyen T. T., Le Q. C. “Adaptation strategies used by low-income residents affected by land use changes in Hanoi, Vietnam.” Conference paper. Presented at the 2017 ASEAN Sustainable Urbanization Congress. Download pdf here.
- Kallis, G. In defense of degrowth. Ed. by Aaron Vansintjan. https://indefenseofdegrowth.com/
Selected media articles
- Vietnam’s low tech food system takes advantage of decay. (Low Tech Magazine, 2017).
- Going beyond the ‘ecological turn’ in the humanities (Entitle Blog, 2016)
- Accelerationism… and degrowth? The left’s strange bedfellows. (Institute of Social Ecology, 2016)
- Degrowth is punk as fuck! (with Sam Bliss, Common Dreams, 2016)
- Let’s define degrowth before we dismiss it. (Resilience, 2015)
- The Anthropocene debate: Why is such a useful concept starting to fall apart? (Entitle Blog, 2015)
- Food Banks: Canned justice or fuel for activism? (Ejolt, 2015)
- Guaranteed basic income is not a panacea. (Truth Out, 2015)
- The anthropocene debate: Why is such a useful concept starting to fall apart? (Uneven Earth, 2015)
- Academia.edu profile: https://birkbeck.academia.edu/AaronVansintjan