Jessica Balling

Jessica Balling is a PhD candidate holding a master’s degree in human geography. She completed her master’s program (Geography: Global Change & Regional Development) at the Leopold-Franzens University of Innsbruck (LFU) in 2020, focusing on sustainable regional and rural development as well as development research in the Global South.

In 2019 she started preparing her master’s thesis at the Institute of Geography within the research group “development studies and sustainability research” in a transdisciplinary project about sustainability on mountain huts. The thesis dealt with human-nature relations in high alpine regions and questioned societal relationships towards nature in this area. Besides her studies she held a position as research assistant within the follow-up project regarding diverse protected areas.

Jessica now combines her main interests in her dissertation project, touching upon questions of the (re)creation and (re)configuration of relationships between human, nature and nation in protected areas.