Jingjing (April) Guo (郭,婧璟)

Biography

‍Jingjing’s story has been one of transition, from an undergraduate trained in biomedical engineering to a PhD fellow exploring social science guided courses to become a change agent.

As part of RECOMS, she studied towards a PhD at the Institute of Social Ecology (SEC), Department of Economic and Social Sciences BOKU - University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria.

Her PhD project focuses on rural communities and their resource practices. She aims to uncover actor relational identities and their relation dynamics in their lived social-ecological complexities, thereby to identify barriers to and enablers of rethinking and transformation of these for more socially and environmentally just resource management. In doing so, she explores ways to help engender collaborative actions in building social-ecological resilience in rural communities.

She seeks to lean into the discomfort of vulnerabilities to learn about resilience.

She completed her bachelor’s degree at the Medical School of the Sun Yat-Sen University in China, followed by a master’s in Sustainable Resource Management at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Prior to RECOMS, she worked as a Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) analyst in Munich for almost 4 years, focused specifically on the environmental, social, and governance issues in the extractive and electronics industries.

Also going by the name of her favourite month, ‘April’, she finds shelter in reading and writing letters.