King’s Water welcomes Nora Buletti, who is joining us from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She will be collaborating with us and finalising her PhD research on participatory processes for watercourse management in Switzerland. As part of a joint research project with the University of Lausanne, and mandated by the Swiss Government’s Federal Office for the Environment, Nora specifically evaluates the effect of the introduction of subsidies for participation in projects of watercourses management. In collaboration with her colleagues of the research project, she also drafted principles to encourage the practice of participation. In her thesis, she is exploring the theoretical concepts necessary to develop a critical approach to analyse institutionalised public participation, and more precisely the role of experts in these processes. Her PhD project therefore includes two dimensions: an applied one and a theoretically based analysis. Nora principally refers to Foucault’s concept of governmentality to analyse dynamics of exclusion and control within the participatory approaches taking place in specific context of river course management projects.
Nora has been at the University of Fribourg since her Bachelor’s degree in Geography, followed by an Msc in Human Geography. She has also been undertaking supervision and teaching of methodological practical courses in human geography, and been a tutor at the Environmental Sciences section. She chose to come to King’s College London to benefit from inputs from her host Dr. Alex Loftus, as well as other PhD students in the department. Her aim is to consolidate her theoretical framework, exploring advantages and limits, as well as creating long-lasting academic relationships for her academic career.
She is supervised by Prof. Olivier Graefe at the University of Fribourg and Dr. Olivier Ejderyan at ETH Zurich, and is working in close collaboration with Dr. Alex Loftus at King’s College London.
Nora’s three water words:
Institutionalized public participation
Governmentality
Exclusion