Ester is Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at Lund University, School of Economics and Management. She also holds a Professorship (with special responsibilities) at the Copenhagen Business School. She is interested in concepts and strategies that may help us better design organizations aiming at social change in general. Her current work focuses on community currencies as a method to build more resilient communities and more inclusive cities.
She uses interventionist methods, actively taking part in the entrepreneurial processes that she also studies. In the past, she founded (and chaired for over 10 years) Förorten i Centrum, a social venture that uses the collective production of mural art to work bottom-up with communities burdened by territorial stigmatization.
Currently, with a group of researchers and practitioners from Gothenburg University and Kenya (JOOUST University), she is part of setting up three community currencies in Kisumu (Kenya). In this doing, they hope to gain a better understanding of the diffusion strategies of grassroots innovations as well as of the economic, social and political impact of these monetary innovations on the communities introducing them