dr. JR (Julia) Spanier

Dr Julia Spanier is a lecturer at the Consumption and Healthy Lifestyles group. Her teaching activities focus on consumption sociology. She obtained her PhD from Utrecht University in 2024 with a thesis titled: ‘A rural(–urban) perspective: Agricultural grassroots initiatives and the making of post-capitalist futures’. She holds a MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance from the University of Oxford (UK), and a BA in Geography and Political Science from the University of Heidelberg (Germany). Next to her academic work, she is a vegetable farmer in training, and has, for many years, been working with social movements and nongovernmental organizations struggling for food sovereignty.

Key publications:

Spanier, J. (2025). Radical rural place-making? Agricultural grassroots initiatives in the everyday negotiation of the European countryside. Journal of Rural Studies, 118, Article 103676. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2025.103676

Spanier, J. (2025). What does it mean to nurture ‘good intentions between city and country’? Performances of rural–urban relations in community-supported agriculture. Geoforum, 159, 1-13. Article 104211. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104211

Guerrero Lara, L., van Oers, L., Smessaert, J., Spanier, J., Raj, G., & Feola, G. (2023). Degrowth and agri-food systems: a research agenda for the critical social sciences. Sustainability Science, 18(4), 1579-1594. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01276-y

Spanier, J. R. (2021). Rural Futurism: Assembling the Future in the Countryside . ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 20(1), 120-141. https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1990/1557