Name and Surname
Vehap Kola
Affiliation
University of New York Tirana
Contact email
vehapkola@unyt.edu.al
Short Biography
Dr. Vehap Kola is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of New York Tirana and an organization studies scholar focused on future-making: how people and organizations build futures through stories, imagination, and selection mechanisms that turn ideas into “rules” in strategy and policy.
He holds a PhD in Management & Organization from Marmara University (2022), where he examined future imaginaries in public strategy-making through the Tirana Master Plan (TR030). He later conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Cagliari (2024–2025) on how entrepreneurs and venture capitalists prospect desirable solutions to grand challenges, drawing on Doughnut Economics and multi-modal qualitative materials.
At RECAS, he develops a comparative, ethics-led program on youth agency and eco-digital imaginaries in the Western Balkans. Methodologically, he combines longitudinal mobile audio diaries, deliberative futures workshops (including backcasting and layered analysis), and light, transparent digital trace ethnography to track how imaginaries evolve over time and when they translate into action, coalitions, and policy-relevant outputs.
Research abstract
Eco-Digital Imaginaries and Youth Agency in the Western Balkans is a longitudinal qualitative study of how young people imagine, and try to build political and ecological alternatives under democratic strain, economic precarity, and accelerating digital platform influence. The project focuses on “eco-digital imaginaries”: future-oriented narratives where climate concerns, everyday livelihood pressures, and digitally mediated public life collide.
It asks three core questions: (1) how youth articulate desirable futures (political, ecological, and European) and how these change over time; (2) how platform dynamics (visibility, algorithms, harassment, misinformation, moderation) shape what feels thinkable and doable; and (3) when imaginaries translate into concrete practices, such as organizing, coalition-building, civic participation, or policy-relevant proposals, and when they stall.
Methodologically, the study combines (a) longitudinal mobile audio diaries (weekly short voice notes), (b) small deliberative futures workshops (to test and refine ideas with participants), and (c) light digital trace ethnography to contextualize narratives without expanding data collection beyond what is ethically necessary. Outputs include a theory contribution on how eco-digital imaginaries form and travel into action, an anonymized longitudinal qualitative dataset, and public-facing deliverables such as a workshop toolkit, a policy brief, and a lightweight prototype aligned with a policy hackathon.