Project team and partners

Project team

Professor Saska Petrova, Principal Investigator

Professor Saska Petrova, Principal Investigator
Professor Saska Petrova, Principal Investigator

Saska's research and policy contributions are situated at the intersection of precarity, gender, and energy resource use.

Working in under-represented communities across the United Kingdom, Europe, South Africa and China, Saska has interrogated the political governance and contestation of social and environmental injustices.

She uses insights from political ecology and feminist geographies in seeking to transform knowledge and practice on low-carbon transitions.

Saska has been involved as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator in over 20 research projects funded by the European Union, several UK research councils, the Royal Geographical Society, Cheshire Lehmann Fund and the Higher Education Academy. Their findings have been published in her monograph on Communities in Transition (Routledge, 2014) while being integrated in multiple decision-making documents and strategies. This includes legislation and policy issued by the European Commission and Parliament, the Jacques Delors Institute, the French Institute for International Relations, as well as the UK National Union of Students.

For more information visit Saska's research profile.

Dr Giulia M Mininni, Research Associate

Dr Giulia M Mininni, Research Associate
Dr Giulia M Mininni, Research Associate

Giulia is a social scientist in energy and sustainability transitions.

Her research explores issues of inequality and power dynamics with a focus on gender differences and feminist approaches.

Giulia has been working in several research projects in the UK, India and Africa centring on women's empowerment, citizen co-benefit from energy demand reduction, retrofitting, and socio-technical implications of energy transitions, securing funds from various institutions.

Giulia was also awarded the UKIERI Fellowship at the TATA Institute in Hyderabad and several funds for her research. In addition to her PhD, she has an MSc in environment and sustainable development from the University College London and she worked for different agencies within the fields of sustainability and international development in the UK and in India.

Dr Lin Zhang, Research Associate

Dr Lin Zhang, Research Associate
Dr Lin Zhang, Research Associate

Lin is a human geographer; her research focuses on quantitative analysis to uncover socio-spatial vulnerabilities as well as gendered disparities in energy access and use in different contexts (including Western Balkans, the UK and China).

Before joining GENERATE Project at The University of Manchester, she contributed to the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project (mapping ambient vulnerabilities in UK cities) led by Dr. Caitlin Robinson at the University of Bristol. Her work focused on the interconnections between summer energy poverty, air quality, and climate factors, and how they influence vulnerable households.

Lin completed her PhD at the Sustainability Research Institute, University of Leeds, studying the spatio-temporal evolution of energy poverty in China, including its assessment, drivers, and policies.

For more information visit Lin's research profile.

Project partners

Advisory board

  • Professor Peter Newell, University of Sussex, UK - a world-leading scholar on the political economies of energy system change and inequality.
  • Professor Liviu Chelcea, University of Bucharest, Romania - an established researcher on post-socialist urban and regional transformations at the everyday level.
  • Professor Chien-fei Chen, Clemson University, USA - with her extensive knowledge on the spatialities of energy inequalities and socio-technological integration.
  • Dr Christina Hoicka, Associate Professor, University of Victoria, Canada - introducing expertise on renewable energy transformations and community relations.
  • Dr Martin Müller, Associate Professor, University of Lausanne, Switzerland - contributing particularly on the positioning of the project’s findings with the political and environmental geographies of the ‘Global East’.
  • Dr Petr Jehlička, Associate Professor, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czechia - a key authority on environmental politics in Eastern Europe, with a specific focus on informal sharing everyday practices in frontier regions.
  • Dr Adriana Zaharijević, Principal Research Fellow, University of Belgrade, Serbia - with specific insights on gender and precarity relevant to the Western Balkans.