Timothy Adams (Dr. PhD) is Postdoctoral researcher of Human Geography in commercial investments of natural resources, institutional change and innovations, inclusive businesses, gender, and resource governance (e.g., land, water, and forest etc.) at the University of Bern, Institute of geography and member of Center for Regional Economic Development (CRED). His current research in sub-Saharan Africa focuses on institutional innovations for inclusive land investments, gender, and environmental justice. He integrates political ecology, science technology and innovation studies perspectives and critical theories into the field of institutional change, land commercialization, gender and development. Further research focuses on the environmental, economic, and social consequences of formalized arrangements of collective tenure institutional innovations (FACT) for commercial land investments (i.e., land, water, forest, and minerals). Timothy Adams’s main research areas are in sub-Saharan Africa but had in the past worked on projects involving commercial land investments in different resources sectors across the African continent (i.e., solar energy in Morocco, Timber plantations in Tanzania, rice farming in Ghana, and sugarcane in Malawi and Zambia).

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Sub-Saharan Africa

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Keywords: Agroecology, Climate Change Adaptation, Climate Politics, Degrowth, Ecological Economics, Energy Justice, Gender and Development, Inter-and Transdisciplinary Research Methods, Legal Geographies, Marine Social Science, Migration, Mobility Concepts, Political Ecology, Postcolonialism, Science and Technology Studies, Socio-Ecological Transformation, Urban and Regional Planning, Institutional Economics

I am a professor and researcher at the University of Guadalajara, in the university center for economic and administrative sciences, attached to the department of social and legal sciences. My research focuses on the implications of climate change in urban areas, with a particular emphasis on communities experiencing high levels of marginalization. My areas of expertise include issues of social vulnerability and disaster risk reduction, which I approach from the lenses of political ecology and environmental justice. My research projects focus particularly on the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area and other cities in Mexico.

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Country/Region of interest/research focus: Guadalajara Metropolitan Area and other cities in Mexico

Sören Weißermel is a human geographer and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Geography, Kiel University. Areas of interest are human-environmental relations, critical development studies, urban studies and urban climate politics. In his PhD-project, he focused on processes of dispossession and precarization of marginalized and invisibilized people and lifeforms in the context of the construction of the Belo Monte power plant (Brazil) and on their struggle for recognition and (environmental) justice. In his current project, he focuses on the socio-spatial implications of urban climate politics in cities of the Global North.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Latin America (Brazil), Northern Germany

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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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Social Anthropology Phd Student, working in Social Construction of Risk and Disasters field studies. My current research focuses in the socionatural causes of the damages provoked by the 2017 7^th September earthquake on a fishery located in the northern coast of Chiapas, Mexico. I work from a historical/political perspective, which I propose as a necessary platform to understand the way power relations shape the disaster process in Latin America contexts, where there´s still a strong colonialist influence. This perspective integrates “politics” concept as authors such as Chantal Mouffe and Jaques Ranciére propose, in order to show the mechanisms local actors, use to resist not only the disaster in its emergency moments, but also the disaster as an historical process, which usually takes place within spaces of intense disputes around natural wealth access.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Chiapas, Mexico