DeSchool 2025

Mariam Abazeri is an environmental and visual anthropologist studying the effects of globalization and climate change on natural resource dependent communities. She is a Presidential Postdoctoral Scholar at the School for Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Her research interests include groundwater governance, intergenerational ecological knowledge, socio-economic inequalities, and visual culture in water-stressed communities from Asia to Latin America. Prior to her doctorate, she worked at various environmental research centers across West and South Asia on natural resource policy and Indigenous and local community conservation strategies. She holds a doctorate in Environmental Science and Policy from the University of Miami and is the Director of the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival.

Diego Arispe-Bazán is an anthropologist whose research centers on the production and circulation of ideologies about colonial history, and their effect on labor and wealth inequality. His ethnographic and semiotic research follows a fine-grained approach to understanding the composition of categories of race and class in Latin America as intertwined colonial processes. His current book project, Making History: Spanish Labor Migrants in 20th Century Lima moves between Lima, Peru and Madrid, Spain, and investigates how migration is impacted by shifts in the global economic system. His most recent research project is built on connections with Indigenous and reconnecting communities across the Andes to identify alternative development models that do not prize industrialization or growth (qua wealth accumulation).

Jason Barahona Rosales is the program coordinator at Degrowth Institute. He works on highlighting the preexisting work directly and indirectly related to the degrowth movement and empowering others to challenge the paradigm of economic growth. These challenges happen in community events, university dialogues, and other engagements that seek to form new combinations of solidarity in order to achieve social and ecological justice.

Malia Becker (she/her) leads creative outreach campaigns at the Center for Biological Diversity addressing the intersection of endless growth, inequitable consumption, and the wildlife extinction crisis. She runs the Simplify the Holidays campaign and the SoKind alternative gift registry to promote solutions to holiday waste and gift-giving. Her work also includes supporting the creation of libraries of things through two pilot projects in 2024. Malia is passionate about discussing degrowth in the environmental and higher ed sectors. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Macalester College in geography and public health.

kier disrupts the status quo with justice-centered education in New York City (NYC) schools, advocating for interdisciplinary policies to build regenerative, equitable futures statewide and nationally. As a founding member of NYC’s annual Earth Convergences, kier blake has a MSc from the New School,  co-creates intergenerational spaces for workshops, teach-ins, and classes that connect justice-driven groups and provide accessible, culturally relevant climate education to low-income communities of color. Working with Indigenous leaders, frontline organizers, and youth activists, we've engaged over 4,880 participants in community-rooted learning and action. As Co-founder of Start:Empowerment, kier has also mentored 40 youth through the organization’s Organizing Fellowship—supporting projects that halted two pipelines, composted 10+ tons of waste, and tackled water inequity on the Texas-Mexico border—impacting over 4,000 students through integrated school-based curricula in NY, TX, and beyond.

Sam Bliss tidies the kitchen for Food Not Bombs Burlington. He also teaches applied economics at the University of Vermont, shepherds a flock of seven sheep, and sings really loudly in an "unamericana" band called Marxist Jargon.

Alison Chopel, MPH, DrPH is a public health researcher and practitioner who focuses on the social and structural determinants of health, and lately has found that exploring the phases of disaster illuminates both systems functioning and systems behavior in times of accelerated change. She strives to focus systems and center the agency of people who have been systematically marginalized. Her main tool is participatory and applied research, designed and implemented in collaboration with co-investigators who bring practical experience, lived experience and complementary disciplines. Chopel also teaches in the Academic Certificate of Planning for Reduction of Disasters, and mentors students in the Masters of Planning. She is passionate about economic equity and climate justice, and has the honor of working with several Puerto Rican organizations that are united in these struggles. She is a student of just transitions and the regenerative economy, and completed the Next Economy MBA program in 2022.

Brian Czech is the executive director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE), which he founded in 2003. Czech served at U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service headquarters from 1999-2017, where he developed the Conservation Biology Program for the National Wildlife Refuge System. During the same period, Czech also served as a visiting professor of natural resource economics in Virginia Tech’s National Capitol Region. A wide-ranging scholar, Czech has published over 50 articles in 20-plus academic journals, along with four books: Supply Shock, Gag-Ordered No More, Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train, and The Endangered Species Act. He has also published hundreds of blog articles for the Steady State Herald, the Daly News, and other outlets. Czech has a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin, an M.S. from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. He was designated an “Eco-Champion” by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility in 2019.

Zach Czuprysnki is the Sustainability Coordinator at Prescott College in Arizona. When he’s not weaving degrowth into campus initiatives, you can find him running the trails of the Central Highlands, hanging out with his chickens and ducks, or thrashing in a mosh pit.

Hayden Dahmm has a background in environmental engineering and environmental policy, and he has worked in the “sustainable development” sector for the past seven years with a focus on data for the SDGs and climate policy. Hayden is based in NYC, where he enjoys exploring the parks, cuisines, and cultural offerings of the city. His sidekick is Rocco, a yellow lab Seeing Eye Dog.

Johanna Delgado Acevedo is a Puerto Rican native and ecologist. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at East Texas A&M University, specializing in Wildlife Science and Conservation. She earned her Ph.D. in Wildlife Sciences from Texas A&M University - Kingsville, where she utilized molecular markers to investigate wild pig population structure in Texas. Additionally, her master's focused on the effects of habitat quality on the morphology of Puerto Rican amphibians, emphasizing environmentally induced phenotypic changes. Her professional journey includes serving as the Director of the Botanical Garden of the University of Puerto Rico, Visiting Assistant Professor at Sul Ross State University, and Research Coordinator for a collaboration agreement between the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico and Casa Pueblo (www.casapueblo.org), a grassroots organization. Johanna has held leadership roles in academia, nonprofit organizations, and community-based initiatives, including her long-standing involvement with Casa Pueblo. She has been a loyal volunteer for Casa Pueblo for over 30 years. Her work continues to focus on inclusive environmental solutions, bridging science and advocacy to foster sustainable, community-driven conservation efforts.

Andras Ferencz is a communications professional working in public health. He is an avid reader of degrowth literature, with a particular interest in the topic of cultural hegemony and dominant cultural narratives. His essay on the hegemonic nature of growth ideology, titled ‘To argue with the King of Growth’, was published in Monthly Review’s MR Online in 2022.

Anthena Gore is a social design strategist and public sector innovator with over a decade of experience advancing climate resilience, energy justice, and urban equity across government and nonprofit sectors. For more than 10 years, she has helped governments, nonprofits and institutions navigate complexity, align diverse stakeholders and craft narratives that drive systems change.

Jack Hammond is a retired sociologist. He taught sociology at the City University of New York. He is the author of Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War in El Salvador and Building Popular Power: Workers’ and Neighborhood Movements in the Portuguese Revolution. He is a member of Caracol, the degrowth caucus of DSA.

Heather Higinbotham is an educator, systems nerd, writer, and TEDx speaker with over twenty years of experience in sustainability and climate leadership. She specializes in meta-crisis education and post-growth and regenerative systems thinking. She holds advanced degrees in Sustainable Systems and Environmental Science.

Amanda Janoo is an economist and systems change expert dedicated to building just and sustainable economies through participatory policy design processes. As the Economics & Policy Lead at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll), she works with governments, civil society, and international organizations to redefine progress and advance economic policies that prioritize human and ecological flourishing over endless growth. Prior to joining WEAll, Amanda worked as an industrial policy and structural transformation expert for UNIDO, the African Development Bank, and GIZ, and is currently an Family Economic Security Fellow at New America. A Fulbright Scholar and Graduate of Cambridge University, Amanda is known for making complex economic ideas accessible and inspiring. She brings both technical expertise and visionary thinking to conversations about the future of our economies.

Aaron Karp is a social movement organizer. He is currently writing a book on how we can cultivate our inner freedom and why the process is essential for addressing crises of sustainability, democracy, security, and purpose. His articles on system change education can be found on freedomsurvival.org, where you can also sign up to provide feedback on a draft of the book.

Suzanne Keers is a semi-retired independent consultant with 40 years of experience helping clients grow and optimize their companies by applying her knowledge of project management, quality improvement, process optimization and general management. She holds an undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, an MBA from the University of Chicago and a Certificate in Liberal Arts from the Basic Program at the University of Chicago. She has been a passionate advocate for new economic models since cofounding Local First Chicago, a not-for-profit organization (2006 – 2017) that was formed to educate members of the public, business leaders and local governments regarding the economic and social benefits provided by locally owned and independent businesses in Chicago. She has been an owner of Dill Pickle Food Coop since before the store opened in 2009. She has served on the Board of Directors several times and is currently the Board Treasurer.

Ashley Marie Lagrange (They/Them) is a therapist, collage artist and organizer born, raised and currently residing in Queens, New York to a multigenerational household with Dominican parents. Ashley works in the day as a politicized therapist and coach for the QTBIPOC population which stemmed from their lived experience with madness and grassroots peer support organizing. Ashley is also a Collage Artist, having taught Collage as Liberation classes at The Peoples Forum, as well as facilitated spaces on Agitation Propaganda. Ashley is a member of DegrowNYC and sits as their Propaganda Chair.

Celeste Levitz-Jones, MS, L.Ac, DCCM (she/her) first became familiar with co-ops when she moved into a housing co-op in Wisconsin. What started as a need to eat better vegetarian food than her university cafeteria could provide turned into a life calling to the cooperative ecosystem.

Through her undergraduate studies in psychology and gender studies, Celeste realized her passion for treating trauma and mental health issues. She chose East Asian Medicine as her healing modality because of its relational, ecological, and holistic approach to health and wellness. Celeste earned her Masters from the Pacific College of Health Sciences and a Diplomat in Canonical Chinese Medicine, an advanced herbal medicine certification. In 2014 she co-founded Five Point Holistic Health, a worker-owned holistic health clinic focused on affordable, accessible, and inclusive acupuncture, massage, and psychotherapy. In addition to providing acupuncture and herbal consultations to clients, Celeste serves as HR Director for Five Point’s twenty-three staff members, seven of which are currently owners.

Outside of her practice, Celeste served on the board of directors at the Dill Pickle Food Co-op from 2017-2020 and as board president in 2020. She mentors owners of small businesses and start-ups who are interested in the worker co-op model. She enjoys tending to her native garden with her husband, cooking, and doting on their two cats.

Tim Linaberry is an activist/organizer/advocate based in the DMV region of the USA. A recent graduate of the Degrowth Master's Program from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, he aims to help proliferate degrowth and post-growth sentiments whenever/wherever possible. As a hospitality stalwart, he has learned the value of calmly communicating important information in tense, high-pressure situations. Along with a (regrettable) BS in Marketing, discussing degrowth and conversing-inversely have become somewhat second-nature to him at this point. When not advocating for fair-wages in the restaurant world, he enjoys writing and performing music in the artivist band The Resistance Company.

Fashion incubator founder turned degrowth advocate, Stella McShera is working with a small but mighty team to build a new kind of business incubator. Their goal is to support people and projects that value care, community, and enoughness over constant growth. They are focused on sustainability, social justice, and creating a cultural shift through 'main street' businesses. As a Filipina entrepreneur, Stella brings systems thinking, cultural awareness, and a deep commitment to collective well-being. She is especially interested in how behavior change—guided by neuroscience—can help us move toward more regenerative, grounded ways of living. For her degrowth masters thesis (through UAB), she piloted The Clothing Library, the first of its kind program in partnership with public libraries.

As a tenured professor of environmental studies, Greg Mikkelson lectured and published in ecology, philosophy, and economics, with a focus on the nature, causes, and value of biological diversity. He also helped divest his university from fossil fuel. He now volunteers as a researcher and organizer for a growing international movement to get tar sands pipelines out of the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence watershed.

John Mulrow is the executive director of Degrowth Institute, co-founder of DegrowUS, and adjunct professor of Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University. His research aims to improve environmental assessment by accounting for social outcomes and biophysical limits to economic growth. John is based in Chicago, where he’s worked on urban farming, composting, and climate action for many years.

Elise O’Malley is a community builder and degrowth advocate based in Chicago. Her professional background includes working with small business owners and companies on their circular economy goals (in other words, reducing their waste!). Elise received facilitator training for the Offers and Needs Market from the Post Growth Institute in 2023.

Matt Orsagh has worked in the financial industry for over 25 years as a researcher, writer, speaker, and convener of individuals interested in sustainability. He is an active advocate for degrowth, ecological economics, and the wellbeing economy.

Jonathan Pereira serves as the Executive Director of Plant Chicago, whose mission is to cultivate local circular economies.  As the Executive Director of a non-profit he wears many hats, including administration, human resources, development/fundraising, program support and strategy for the organization. Since joining Plant Chicago in 2015, he’s guided the organization to expand its impact to focus on education, food access, small business support, and solar outreach on the Southwest Side of Chicago. In late 2019, Plant Chicago moved into an abandoned firehouse and is in the process of converting it to a center for circular economy programming, including a shared use indoor farm called the Indoor Victory Garden. 

I started my career in investment banking. Perpetual growth modeling never made sense to me. I only really comprehended the absurdity after I left however and started studying permaculture and environmental activism. That was in 2016 and since then I've spent more of my time focused on progressive electoral and social justice organizing, particularly around racial and economic justice in the US. I grew up in the Philippines before moving to DC in high school, where I’m based now. I got married last year and have a cat, Kiwi, and in my free time you can usually find me playing soccer, hanging by the river or the sea, and growing vegetables.

Anna Prouty is a writer, artist and community organizer living in Cascadia. She is the media and outreach coordinator for DGI, and a co-founder of DegrowUS. Today, she primarily focuses on ecological restoration, resilience, dual power and weaving regional, democratic economies. Her debut novel, Genesis, will be released in summer 2026 by Vine Leaves Press.

With a background in economics and brand strategy, I am trained in using insights into human behavior to sell ideas. Through my recent master’s at UAB-ICTA I began to explore the emancipatory power of commoning, where my thesis sparked my passion to help strengthen and expand concrete opportunities in Canada for reorganizing care toward a communal, universal model. I seek to apply my strategic planning and creative problem solving expertise from a decade working at globally-recognized advertising agencies and marketing teams to chart viable pathways for economic transformation —akin to the far right’s strategic gains, but oriented towards egalitarian low carbon futures. So far, I have channeled this into work with the International Degrowth Network's communication circle, a work-in-progress interactive roleplay based training game to talk about eco-socialism, and exploring time banking with feminist degrowth comrades in Toronto, Ontario where I am based. I'm eager to explore new opportunities and connections. 

Emilia Reyes is a feminist activist on global justice, aiming at the liberation of the Global South while promoting a feminist revolution that respects the biosphere’s integrity. She has been convener of many global feminist spaces in United Nations processes. She is the Coordinator of the Campaign of Campaigns, and also the founder of the Degrowth and Delinking Collective.

Emma Schoenberg is a trainer, organizer, and artist with The Magpie Project, an experiment in transformative movement building and mutual aid. She is the co-founder of NoCoalNoGas, the successful direct action campaign to close the last coal plant on New England’s electrical grid. She is a co-creator of the sacred activism project, the Fierce Vulnerability Network, Most recently, she was a member of the Core Team at the Climate Disobedience Center.

Nina Smolyar is a PhD student at the University of Vermont, Graduate Fellow at Gund Institute for the environment, and part of the Leadership for the Ecozoic academic community. Her current research focuses on the relationship between degrowth peer-reviewed research and degrowth practice outside of academia, how actors in the movement are responding to the rise of authoritarianism, and how the role of spirituality shapes degrowth’s academic scholarship and enactment in communities.

Miriam Stevens is an industrial ecologist who studies critical mineral supply chains at the U.S. Geological Survey. Her research focuses on estimating the material requirements along with social and environmental impacts of the energy transition. Miriam was an organizer of several degrowth symposiums as a member of Purdue University's branch of Degrowth Coffee Hour, a monthly forum to discuss literature and strategies for just, ecological transitions and living within planetary boundaries. Before becoming a computational researcher, she worked at the intersection of urban sustainability and manufacturing in the Chicago region.

Mike Strode is a writer, facilitator, solidarity economy strategist, and long-time Chicago activist for cooperative work structures. He is the founding coordinator of the Kola Nut Collaborative, a mutual support network of people engaged in reciprocal exchange of services, skills, and goods through a timebank where the currency is an hour of time for everyone. He is also a Post-Growth Fellow at the Post-Growth Institute.

Ronald Trosper has just retired as Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona. His latest work is Indigenous Economics; Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands (University of Arizona Press, 2022), which explores the consequences of Indigenous relationality for economic activity. He examined the institutions that provided stability for the peoples of the Northwest Coast in his book, Resilience, Reciprocity and Ecological Economics: Northwest Coast Sustainability (Routledge, 2009). His Ph.D. degree is in Economics, Harvard University (1974). He is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation, Montana.

Convinced of the transformative potential of networking, Jennifer is an Art of Hosting practitioner and liaison for Colombia. Her experience in reengineering of organizational processes toward dynamic governance models comes from her work as Cofounder of the Council of Sustainable Settlements of Latin America, and (former) President of the Board of Trustees of the Global Ecovillage Network. She was trained in the Oasis Game methodology with the ELOS Institute in Brazil and participated in the Clean Energy Voyage Antarctica International Treaty expedition with Antarctica 2041, which among other international ventures have added to her experience as facilitator of participatory processes for socio-ecological impact in multicultural contexts.