1 March 2026

Photo: Barbara Muraca

Barbara Muraca was Associate Professor of Environmental Philosophy at the University of Oregon until January 2026 and is currently fellow with HIAS, the Hamburger Institute of Advanced Studies with an affiliaton at "Futures of Sustainability". From 2018 to 2022 she served as lead author in the Assessment Report on Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature for IPBES (the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services). She has published numerous book chapters and articles on relational values as framework for environmental philosophy, valuation, and policy and on Sustainability and Degrowth in leading Journals (including Bioscience, Environmental Values, PNAS, Ecological Economics and COSUST) and two books in German on the theoretical foundations of Strong Sustainability and on Degrowth. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Greifswald and worked as Post-Doc at the Advanced Research Group 'Landnahme, Acceleration, Activation. Dynamics and (De)stabilization of Post-Growth-Societies’ funded by the DFG (German Federal Research Agency) at the University of Jena, before moving to Oregon in 2014. Her research focuses on the diverse values of people-nature relationships, on sustainability, ecological economics, degrowth, and, more recently, on decolonial perspectives in environmentalism, bio(cultural)diversity, and convivial conservation.

A warm welcome to the Centre, Barbara!