Department of Business Humanities and Law

Lara Monticelli holds a master’s degree in Economics and Social Sciences (Bocconi University, Milan) and a Ph.D. in Economic Sociology (University of Brescia). Before joining Copenhagen Business School as an Assistant Professor and Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow in September 2018, she has been awarded a grant by the Italian Fondazione Banca del Monte di Lombardia to conduct an explorative project on ecological and utopian communities in collaboration with the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT), Erasmus University (Rotterdam). Prior to this, Lara worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy). The research she conducted during her post-doc was focusing on the study of political engagement among young precarious workers, combining perspectives from the sociology of work, social movement, and political participation studies.

Her ongoing Marie Skłodowska-Curie project (2018-2021), titled ‘EcoLabSS – Ecovillages as Laboratories of Sustainability and Social Change’, focuses on the (re)emergence of community-based, prefigurative social movements (e.g. sustainable communities, eco-villages, transition towns, solidarity networks) as living laboratories experimenting with practices of resilience and resistance to environmental, economic and societal challenges. Lara is especially interested in how these movements re-politicize and re-configure everyday life, thus representing radical attempts to embody the critique to contemporary capitalism and prefigure alternative, sustainable futures. Lara is also involved in a number of parallel research and editorial projects in collaboration with non-governmental organizations like the Global Ecovillage Network and ECOLISE – the European Network for Community Led Initiatives on Climate Change and Sustainability.

In the past years, she has co-chaired two mini-conferences within the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (Berkeley 2016, Lyon 2017), creating a vibrant and international forum for the discussion of the emerging, interdisciplinary research field focusing on prefigurative politics, alternative futures and radical imagination in grassroots, community-based social movements. Since 2017, she is the co-founder and co-chair of the research network 'Alternatives to Capitalism' within the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE).

Since 2021, she is the co-editor, together with Torsten Geelan (University of Copenhagen) of the book series “Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st Century” published by Bristol University Press.  

She is also affiliated researcher at the CoresNet research network for the study of consumption networks and practices of sustainable economies and member of the collective “Women on the Verge” that gathers female scholar-activists from Australia, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, the UK and the US.

At CBS, she is a member of the research initiative “Transformational economies and societies” and one of the coordinators of the new Cand.soc. Minor “Transforming Business and Organizations to Build Sustainable and Democratic Economies”.

Link to personal website: www.laramonticelli.com

EcoLabSS explainer video: EcoLabSS - Ecovillages as Laboratories of Sustainability and Social Change (Lara Monticelli, CBS)