Francesca Savoldi is a transdisciplinary scholar with a PhD in human geography. Her work concerns the dimensions of power, politics, space and place, currently with a focus on coastal cities and maritime areas.

As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at TU Delft (2021–2023), she investigated the contested and evolving condition of port cities. Grounded in critical geography and political ecology, her work examined how emerging politics of circulation reshape spatial and ecological relationships, sparking civic resistance and socio-political emancipation in port cities.

Francesca has worked on several high-impact EU-funded projects on topics such as citizen science, climate change adaptation and inequalities in coastal environments, blue economies, and policy (Jean Monnet Chair), as well as post-conflict urbanism. She has conducted research and lectured at several universities including TU Delft, Erasmus University, Ca’ Foscari University, Glasgow Caledonian University, and Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Mediterranean region, Indonesia, Latin America

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Diego Silva is an economist/anthropologist and works as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre of International Environmental Studies (CIES) at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), in Geneva. His work is located at the intersection of science and technology studies, environmental and economic anthropology, and agrarian studies. His current research agenda includes: 1) the socio-technical analysis of seed commodity networks and the rural conflicts surrounding the deployment of agricultural innovations in Latin America (FNS Postdoc project); 2) the anthropological study of climate change mitigation in agriculture through the emergent knowledge and practices of environmental accounting (PI: prof. Shaila Seshia Galvin); and 3) the political ecology of the EU energy transition with a focus on the lithium battery production chain, linking Latin American suppliers of lithium minerals with the European lithium battery industry (co-coordinator for the project led by prof. Marc Hufty).

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Latin America, Colombia and Argentina

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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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Researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast-Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). Yvonne’s research interests are power asymmetries in access to natural resources. In her current research project she investigates climate change and governance in marine protected areas in the Dutch Caribbean and Indonesia. She is also involved in the DFG-funded project “Ecological and socio-economic functions of low land rainforest transformation systems in Sumatra, Indonesia”, where land and forests were the resources at focus, also in the context of governance and governability. Yvonne is also interested in feminist political ecologies.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Dutch Caribbean, Indonesia

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Nicolás is Ecologist from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia), MSc and PhD in Geography from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is currently an Associate Academic Technician at the Center for Multidisciplinary Research on Chiapas and the Southern Border of UNAM. Nicolás is self-described as a critical cartographer and an academic activist committed to social and environmental causes. He is part of the Conflict, Region and Rural Societies research group ascribed to the Faculty of Environmental and Rural Studies, member of the Collective for the Protection of the Province of Sugamuxi since 2012, member of the Cartographic Collective of the Global South since 2022, founder and coordinator of the Latin American Network for Community Use of Drones, and member of the Latin American Network for the Defense of Biocultural Heritage.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Latin America

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