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

Dr. Rosa Felicitas Philipp is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Economic and Social Geography Group at Heidelberg University. She completed her PhD at the University of Bern with the dissertation “Defensa de la vida (Defence of Life): Infrastructured Bodies, Care and Resistance at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.” In her doctoral research, she examined the resistance of Indigenous women against a mega-infrastructure project in southern Mexico. Her research focuses on feminist and decolonial perspectives with a regional emphasis on Latin America. Methodologically, she works with audiovisual, ethnographic, and participatory approaches. In her current postdoctoral project, she investigates urban heat in the context of environmental justice.

Links

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Latin America

Assistant professor of political science at Sciences Po Paris. Her research draws on political science, human geography and development studies, and examines the politics of climate change in small island states, with a particular focus on adaptation finance, coastal adaptation, and UN climate negotiations.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Small Island Developing States, Comoros, Seychelles

Link

{:en}Mirja Schoderer is a transdisciplinary researcher with expertise in environmental justice, political ecology, water, mining and conservation. She is an assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she explores the uneven green transition, focusing on the extraction of critical raw materials and on how frontline communities experience and conceptualize extraction that takes place under the green transition paradigm. Her research centers lived experiences and creative methods and explores options to integrate plural knowledges and ontologies into public decision-making, for which she also applies context-sensitive synthesis methods. With a background in literature studies and environmental politics and management, Mirja’s work always comes back to how the material and the symbolic are interlinked, exploring, i.a., how imaginaries and discourses manifest in institutions and practices, and how these, in turn, consolidate or challenge imaginaries. Her PhD research on mining and water governance in Mongolia exemplifies this, but so does her more recent work on nature conservation in Colombia.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Mongolia

Link

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.

Link