Elia’s main research interest is the investigation of nature-society relationships in capitalism, with a particular emphasis on the political ecology of nature conservation. Her current research focuses on conservation in relation to the economic value of nonhuman nature and is guided by radical research on the neoliberalization of nature, the historical-geographic conception of neoliberalism, uneven development, and the capitalist production of nature and space, as well as by Marxist political economy—particularly the Marxian theory of value and rent.
Since 2009, she has been conducting research on critical geographies of nature. From 2009 to 2013, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the multidisciplinary EU project SCALES, coordinated by the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge from 2013 to 2016 and, in 2014, was awarded an Individual Intra-European Marie Curie Post-doctoral Fellowship to conduct interdisciplinary research on the social, economic, cultural, and ecological implications of the application of environmental markets in the UK. Elia was a visiting scholar at the Finnish Environment Institute (2011) and the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at City University of New York (2015). Since 2016, she has been a lecturer of human geography in the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford University.
RCC Research Project: A Historical-Geographical Analysis of the Evolution of Market-Based Conservation in Europe: The Case of the UK
Selected Publications:
- with William M. Adams. “Offsetting Biodiversity: Reframing Nature to Save It.” Oryx 51, no. 1 (2017): 23–31.
- with William M. Adams. “Biodiversity Offsetting and the Reframing of Conservation: A Reply to Ten Kate & von Hase and Dempsey & Collard.” Oryx 51, no. 1 (2017): 40–42.
- with William M. Adams. “Neoliberal Capitalism and Conservation in the Post-crisis Era: The Dialectics of ‘Green’ and ‘Un-green’ Grabbing in Greece and the UK.” Antipode 47, no. 1 (2015): 15–35.
- with Dimitrios Bormpoudakis, Rikka Paloniemi, Joanna Cent, Małgorzata Grodzinska-Jurczak, Agata Pietrzyk-Kaszynska, and John D. Pantis. “Governance Rescaling and the Neoliberalization of Nature: The Case of Biodiversity Conservation in Four EU Countries.” International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology 21, no. 6 (2014): 481–94.
- with Rikka Paloniemi. “Frames of Scale Challenges in Finnish and Greek Biodiversity Conservation.” Ecology and Society 17, no. 4 (2012): 9.
- with John D. Pantis. “Development Plans versus Conservation: Explanation of Emergent Conflicts and Governmental Political Handling.” Environment and Planning A 42, no. 4 (2010): 982–1000.