Associate Professor of Sociology and directing the Copenhagen Centre of Political Mobilisation and Social Movement Studies CoMMonS at the University of Copenhagen. Her current research is on feminist and queer coalitions with migrants in Scandinavia, the US, and Germany, and on the conditions under which middle class white majority people in the Global North engage in acts of solidarity with people affected by drought, floods, and forced displacement. She integrates queer perspectives and critical theories into the fields of social movement studies and democratic theory. Further research focuses on the impact of climate change and forced migration on democratic processes and on the critical discourse historical analysis of far right and right wing populist mobilisation.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, United States, Central Europe

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Wendy Chávez is an economist (Polytechnic School of Guayaquil, Ecuador) and holds a master’s degree in public administration (New York, USA) and a master’s degree in human settlements (KU Leuven, Belgium). She is a junior researcher and PhD student in Political and Cultural Change at the Center for Development Research of the University of Bonn. Her thesis project is about conflicts caused in the small-scale fisheries due to the large-sale fisheries, and coastal dynamics in the Gulf of Guayaquil, with a focus on power, community justice, corruption, gangs´ operations and knowledge mobility. She has worked in the Ecuadorian academia, government sector, and civil society organizations. She is a founder member of the Observatory of Public Policy of Guayaquil. She also performs voluntarily as the Academic Coordinator of the local organization Fundación Cerro Verde, which works actively with ancestral communities of the Gulf of Guayaquil to conserve the mangrove ecosystem.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Gulf of Guayaquil, Ecuador

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Christian Buske holds a degree in biology and a master’s degree in administrative sciences and worked in environmental protection and nature conservation before becoming head of management training in the education sector in Schleswig-Holstein. He has been working as a ministerial councilor for the state government in Schleswig-Holstein since 2018. He  is the editor of the blog The Future as a Possibility, in which he writes about approaches for a global social contract on the principles of coexistence as an essential prerequisite for a successful future. In his utopian novel Anninarra – Die Zukunft als Möglichkeit (Ihleo-Verlag), he shows a world that has gone down this path and in which fundamental problems of humanity such as war, hunger and environmental destruction have been solved and their long-term survival on Earth has been secured. He is  also a member of Die Auswärtige Presse e.V. International Association of Journalists Hamburg.

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Elena Zepharovich is a researcher at the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Bern. She finished her PhD at University of Bern at the Institute of Geography. Before joining the CDE, she was working at Vienna University of Economics (WU) in the Department of Ecological Economics in the field of Education for Sustainable Development. Her current research focus lies on inequality, environmental justice, and deforestation in the Argentinean Chaco.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Argentinia

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Patricia Widener is a professor of sociology at Florida Atlantic University, and her research and teaching interests include social movements and environmental, climate, and marine justice. In the past, she has researched how communities and environmental groups responded to offshore and onshore oil extraction or expansion activities in Aotearoa New Zealand, Ecuador, and in Florida in the U.S. Currently, she is exploring how coastal Florida is responding to sea-level rise and coastal erosion. She is also engaged in an ongoing project examining the visual and coastal opportunity space for climate awareness, ecological educations, oil promotions, and oil resistance along the Florida and Gulf of Mexico coastlines in the U.S.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Sites of Offshore and Onshore Oil & Gas Extraction. Past research has included Ecuador, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the U.S., including Alaska, Florida, and Texas. Current research is along the Florida and Gulf of Mexico coastlines in the U.S.

Researcher at the Department of Urban and Rural Development with interests in feminist political ecology, water resource management, gender and development research and geographical Education for Sustainable Development. Stephanie holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Cologne, Germany. She received a four-year Mobility Grant of FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning for the project “Revitalizing community-managed irrigation systems in contexts of out-migration in Nepal” (2019-2023). Currently Stephanie is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, UK.

Before she was a Postdoctoral Fellow for Gender, Poverty and Institutions at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Kathmandu, Nepal, and led studies in inter- and transdisciplinary projects within the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Program “Water, Land and Ecosystems” in India, Nepal and Bangladesh (2014-2017). For her PhD thesis, she conducted empirical research on Education for Sustainable Development in policy, textbooks and practice by examining geography teaching on water resources at secondary schools in Pune, India. Her book „Transformative Pedagogic Practice“ is published with Springer 2018.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Nepal, India, Bangladesh

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