Dr Tobias Müller is Principal Investigator of the project “Democratic Futures: Climate Change, Coloniality and State Legitimacy”, funded through a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2024-2027), and a Fellowship at The New Institute, Hamburg. Previously, he held research and teaching positions at Oxford, Munich, Leiden, Yale and Cambridge, where he received his PhD in Politics and International Studies. His research interests include political and social theory, the politics of climate change, secularism and Islam in Europe, and decolonial and feminist theory. As a political theorist with a preference for ethnographic methods, his current research investigates shifting political visions and strategies across climate movements in the UK, US, Uganda and Kenya. His research has been funded by the European Research Council, the DAAD, the Cambridge Trust and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. His recent work has been published in Political Theory, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Compass, Religion, State and Society and Review of Faith & International Affairs. He has published various op-eds, including in Nature.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: UK, Germany, Uganda, Kenya, US

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Silja Klepp is Professor of Human Geography at Kiel University. She is a trained social anthropologist. Her research group “Social Dynamics in Coastal and Marine Areas” deals with human-environment relations in the Anthropocene. In her current research on climate change migration and adaptation, she integrates postcolonial perspectives, justice dimensions and critical theories in the study of the social effects of climate change. Silja’s field research experience includes countries such as Kiribati, Vanuatu, New Zealand, Italy, Libya, Malta, and Zambia. She is Alumna of the German Young Academy of Scientists (Die Junge Akademie) and an appointed member of the Council for Migration and the scientific advisory board of Heinrich Böll Foundation, amongst other transdisciplinary engagements. Together with Jonas Hein and Florian Dünckmann she founded the transdisciplinary network of environmental justice EnJust. In order to achieve more inclusive and creative ways of making science she works with transdisciplinary approaches and artistic research.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Kiribati, Vanuatu, New Zealand, Italy, Libya, Malta, and Zambia

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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

Assistant Professor of Bioethics and Anthropology at Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, and member of the Political Ecology Working Group at the Latin American Social Science Council (CLACSO), the environmental NGO Grupo Semillas and FIAN Colombia, an organization that advocates for the right to food. She has worked on seed conflicts due to the expansion of GM crops and intellectual property rights as well as on grassroots alternatives based on agroecology and food and seed sovereignty in Colombia. Her current research focuses on socio-environmental conflicts linked to payments for ecosystems services, particularly carbon markets and REDD+ programs in the Colombian Amazon. She integrates political ecology perspectives and environmental ethics into her research. Laura Gutiérrez’s main research area is in Colombia.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Colombia

Silke Oldenburg is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She is the PI of the research project “Space, Agency and Climate Change in a Contested Urban Landscape: Exploring Urban Environmental Futures in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia”, funded by the Leading House of the Latin American Region, Switzerland. She integrates critical urban theory approaches with political ecology and is passionate about the untold stories within environmental politics. Her recent ethnographic focus is on wetlands and the entanglements of race, ecology and socio-spatial inequalities in mangrove restoration in Cartagena de Indias, a city on the Colombian Caribbean coast.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Cartagena de Indias, Colombian Caribbean and Goma, Eastern DR Congo

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Rebecca Bratspies is a Law Professor at City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law, and the founding Director of the Center for Urban Environmental Reform. She is an internationally recognized expert on environmental justice, food justice, and the human right to a healthy environment. Professor Bratspies has written scores of law review articles, op-eds, and other publications. Her most recent book is Environmental Justice: Law Policy and Regulation.

Professor Bratspies serves as an appointed member of the New York City’s Environmental Justice Advisory Panel, and US EPA’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee. She is a scholar with the Center for Progressive Reform, Deputy Director for North American with the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment, and is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Law in Context. She is Past-President of the American Association of Law Schools Section on the Environment. A former Luce Scholar, she is a graduate of Wesleyan University and holds a law degree cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania.

Her environmentally-themed comic books Mayah’s Lot and Bina’s Plant, made in collaboration with artist Charlie LaGreca-Velasco, have brought environmental literacy to a new generation of environmental leaders.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: New York City

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