For her dissertation within the junior research group flumen, Lilian Pungas traveled to the region around Narva in North-Eastern Estonia in August 2019. Partly with the help of her translator she conducted interviews with different experts in the bioeconomy sector and/or practitioners of (semi-)subsistence agriculture in Estonian as well as in Russian language.

Jana Holz was from the 12^th until the 23^rd of August 2019 a visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki, doing research for her dissertation project. In total, she spendt four weeks in the North European country and visited the capital  Helsinki, Tampere, Joensuu and Jyväskvlä. Jana Holz is writing her dissertation on innovations and changes in the Finnish forestry sector with reference to the bioeconomy and its socio-structural significance for transformation processes within the framework of the junior research group flumen.

Lilian Pungas, Philip Koch and Jana Holz attended the symposium “Resources in Social Science Environmental Research” at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research from the 30th September until the 1st October, 2019 for “flumen”. Approximately 20 junior academics presented and discussed both, material and immaterial, resources and questions such as: how do resources shape the relationship between society and the environment, various dimensions of social inequality regarding the (in)availability and the use of resources, and what constitutes and defines a resource, in general.

flumen researcher Lilian Pungas gave a lecture on 7 November 2019 at the University of Vienna, at the Institute for Political Science as part of their lecture series “Ecological Crisis in Eastern Europe”. Lilian’s lecture was titled “Subsistence farming under high voltage power lines and next to oil shale power plants in Eastern Estonia”. 

Globally seen Estonia extracts of the oil shale, this resulting in very high ecological footprint per capita. For the sake of energy security from its Eastern neighbor (oil shale covers 90% of Estonia’s electricity demand) it accepts as a country an ecologically extremely high price for the extraction of one of the most polluting fossil fuels. Paradoxically, the oil shale extraction itself takes place in Eastern Estonia near Russian border in the region of Ida-Virumaa, where most habitants belong to the Russian-speaking minority, which suffered disproportionally in the 90s due to different economic reforms and the 1992 citizenship law.