We are currently working diligently to put together an interdisciplinary group of plenary speakers that explore the concept of extractivisms and alternatives from many angles and localities - so please check back soon for more information!
Andréa Zhouri holds a degree in Social Sciences from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (1984), a Masters in Social Anthropology from the State University of Campinas (1992) and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Essex, England (1998). She is currently a full professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where she created the Group of Environmental Studies (GESTA) and coordinated the team that created the undergraduate course in SocioEnvironmental Sciences. Her research interests have been developed under a Political Ecology perspective with themes like Socio-Environmental Conflicts, Environmental Justice, Large Projects such as Mining, Hydroelectric Dams and Disasters. She has been an active member of several scientific associations, as the National Association for Research and Postgraduate Studies in Social Sciences (ANPOCS) and the Brazilian Association of Anthropology (ABA), where she also coordinated the Committee on Traditional Peoples, Environment and Large Projects (2011-2012). Zhouri was a fellow of the desiguALdade.net project of the Iberoamerican Institute of Berlin together with the Latin American Institute of the Free University of Berlin (December 2013) and held a CAPES Senior Research Fellowship at FU Berlin and Universität Kassel, Germany in 2017. She is a CNPq (National Council of Development and Technology) researcher and advisor to the Brazilian Anthropology Association presidency on environmental issues. Zhouri has published articles and books about mining, large dams, environmental conflicts and deregulation in Brazil. Some of the latest are: Dossier Mining, Violence and Resistance. Vibrant Issue, V. 14,n. 2, 2017 and Laschefski & Zhouri Indigenous peoples, traditional communities and the environment: the ‘territorial question’ under the new developmentalist agenda in Brazil In: Puzone, V. & Miguel, Luis Felipe (eds). The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century. Palgrave MacMillan, 2019.
Lochner Marais is Professor of Development Studies at the Centre for Development Support (University of the Free State). Marais’s research interests lie in three different though related themes: housing policy, small urban areas (including secondary cities, mining towns and their economies) and public health. In addition to concentrating on each of these themes separately, he primarily focuses on integrating them. He has authored, co-authored and compiled more than 200 research reports, including more than 130 refereed articles in peer-reviewed journals or books (100 journal articles, 29 chapters in books and three inclusions in conference proceedings). He has also co-edited six books. In the past six years, he has been the PI or Co-PI of research grants to the value R20m. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of the Journal for Housing and the Built Environment, International Journal of Housing Policy and Housing Studies (all indexed in the Web of Science).