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

Mirja has an interdisciplinary background in the field of environmental social sciences and a degree in comparative literature. She’s a researcher at the German Development Institute in Bonn where her PhD work focusses on water governance in general and on water and mining conflicts in particular. Mirja is interested in the intersection between institutions and discourses; in the ways in which how we speak and think about natural resources shape how we manage them and vice versa. Further research focusses on knowledge regimes and infrastructures for marine CO₂ observation. Mirja has a keen interest in feminist political ecology, feminist methodologies and intersectional research.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Mongolia

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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

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.

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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I am a postdoctoral researcher working on the politics of knowledge and power in global environmental governance. My work examines how legitimacy, inclusivity, and justice are negotiated within the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement and in emerging review mechanisms under the Rio Conventions, drawing on Science and Technology Studies, political sociology, and sustainability studies.

I am part of the SNIS-funded Global Stocktake (GST) project at the University of Geneva as well as currently employed the ClimDev project of the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) and lecturer at the Geography and Sociology Department of the University of Bonn.

I hold a PhD in Knowledge and Environmental Sociology from the Centre for Development Research of the University of Bonn, an MPhil in Environmental Policy from the University of Cambridge, and a BSc in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Further my academic experience includes visiting research stays at the Uniersidade Estadual de Rio de Janeiro (2025), University of Ghana, Universidade de São Paulo, and Ahmedabad University (all 2023) as well as earlier study at the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research in Mumbai (2018).

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Global Environmental Governance

Links: https://niklas-wagner.eu

https://www.linkedin.com/in/wagner-niklas/