Natalia-Rozalia Avlona

Bio intro

"My name is Natalia-Rozalia Avlona and I am a researcher and activist on commons over the last seven years. I have been actively involved in many "commons" initiatives both in UK and Greece, as well as in the Commons Festival in Athens where I co-organised the workshop "Feminist approaches to the commons", inspired by the work of Sylvia Federici.

I am particularly interested in the notion of labour and reciprocity in digital commons communities and the political subjectivation around the commoning practices, which i study along with contemporary social movements.

Being involved with a Social and Solidarity Economy initiative in Athens over the last year, I came to understand the necessity of studying the collaborative commons economies under the light of the tradition of cooperatives and more broadly the social and solidarity economy initiatives.

Last but not least, I do claim that it is of particular importance to reinvent a contemporary feminist approach within the commons culture, since it seems that it has been a domain dominated by men and masculine perception." (Commonswatch mailing list, October 2016)

Bio

"Natalia- Rozalia Avlona is scientific advisor in the General Secretariat for Gender Equality at the Ministry of Interior and Administrative Reconstruction, in Greece.

She is a graduate of Athen’s Law School, obtained her Masters in Laws (LLM) from King’s College London, and continued her studies in Human Geography (MRES) at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has extensive experience as consultant in intellectual property law, open knowledge, and gender legal issues. She has worked over the last ten years in UK, Belgium and Greece and has collaborated, amongst others, with Royal College of Art (London), Future Emerging Technologies (DG Connect, EU Commission) in Brussels, GUNET (Academic Network) in Athens, Creative Commons England and Wales and Abandon Normal Devices (AND) in Manchester. She has organised and taught a series of seminars on Wikipedia for GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) in Greece and co- initiated a series of workshops on open source programming for women in hackerspace.gr, in Athens (Django Girls Athens).

Since 2016, Natalia Avlona has been a researcher at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki in Greece."