Bio
Melike Kaplan is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD Fellow at Aalborg University, where she researches how democratic economies can enable more just and regenerative futures of work as part of the Re-TECH research group. With a background in Economic and Organizational Sociology, Anthropology, and Literature, she has worked across research, writing, facilitation, and community-based organizing.
As part of her 2026–2027 Fellowship at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (ICDE), Melike investigates why platform cooperatives struggle to emerge and persist in Denmark. Through ethnographic and participatory design research, she maps Copenhagen’s cooperative ecosystem and examines the structural, cultural, and institutional barriers facing cooperative digital enterprises, identifying the conditions under which they might thrive.
Her research is part of the Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network Reworlding, which positions Participatory Design as a method for addressing intertwined social and ecological challenges. Her PhD project uses participatory design and action research to explore how a Future Jobs Lab in Copenhagen can support marginalized groups in developing ecologically and socially regenerative forms of work and business, with particular focus on how technology can be designed to enable such enterprises.