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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{:en}My current research focus is on planetary health. In my master’s thesis, I will analyse the German debate on planetary health with a particular focus on climate justice and transformation models. I try to incorporate postcolonial, discrimination-sensitive and feminist thinking into my research and writing. More-than-human ecologies, multispecies ethnography and medical anthropology as well as multimodality and science communication are also in my area of interest.

Country/Region of interest/research focus: Munich and surrounding area

Involvement in the collaborative research project Careseite zum Thema multispezies Gesundheit und Care im Anthropozän

Arianna Porrone is a PhD student in Global Studies. Justice, Rights, Politics, at the Department of political science, communication and international relations of the University of Macerata, Italy. Awarded with a One-Year Research Grant for Doctoral Candidates (2020-2021) she has joined the research group Social Dynamics in Coastal and Marine Areas of Kiel University as a visiting researcher.
Her main research interests are political ecology, environmental justice, storytelling and the environmental humanities as well ecofeminisms and feminist critical theories. Her Ph.D research focuses on understanding power and gender dynamics in knowledge creation within the current international environmental governance realm and aims at exploring ontological pluralism as a way forward able to reconcile human and more-than-human concerns.

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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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Florian Dünckmann heads the working group for cultural geography at the Geography Department in Kiel. He deals with questions of political ecology, the development of rural areas and processes of democracy-building. Hannah Arend’s philosophy and current practical theories form the theoretical approach to these topics.

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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