Associate Professor, University of Binghamton, New York, USA
Jason W. Moore is an associate professor of sociology at Binghamton University in New York, USA. He is author and editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), Capitalocene or Anthropocene? (Ombre Corte, 2017), and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017). His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, including the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2003), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association, 2002 and 2015), and the Byres and Bernstein Prize in Agrarian Change (2011). He is chair (2017-18) of the Political Economy of the World-System Section (ASA), and coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.
Professor, University of California, Davis, USA
Marisol de la Cadena has been trained as an anthropologist in Peru, England, France, and the United States. Her interests are located at the interface between STS and non-STS, and they include the study politics, multispecies (or multi-entities) relations, indigeneity, history and the a-historical, world anthropologies and the anthropologies of worlds. In all these areas, her concern is the relationship between concepts and methods, and interfaces as analytical sites. More prosaically, she is interested in ethnographic concepts – those that blur the distinction between what we call theory and the empirical, can also indicate the limits of both, and thus open them up to what exceeds them.
Her recent book Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015) is based on conversations with two Quechua speaking men that lived in Cuzco (Peru). Through these conversations they think together about life at the intriguing crossroads where modern politics (and history) and earth-beings (and the ahistorical) meet and diverge, thus exceeding each other. The book is an ethnography concerned with the concreteness of incommensurability and the eventfulness of the ahistorical.
Currently her field sites are cattle ranches and veterinary schools in Colombia. There she engages practices and relations between people, cows, and ‘things’ in general. Thinking at divergent bio/geo interfaces, she is interested in capturing “the stuff” that makes life and death in conditions of dramatic ecological and political change as the country endures extreme droughts and floods and wants to transition between the violence of war to a condition of peace that might not be without violence.
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, USA
Andrej Grubacic a Professor and Department Chair of Anthropology and Social Change Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His interest in world systems analysis and anarchist anthropology has influenced his research perspective, which includes experiences of self-organization, voluntary association, and mutual aid on the world-scale. His principal research focus is on the autonomous "cracks" peopled by Don Cossacks, Atlantic pirates, Macedonian Roma, Jamaican Maroons and Mexican Zapatistas. This research is included in his UC Press book Living at the Edges of Capitalism (2016), winner of the 2017 American Sociological Association PEWS prize for Distinguished Scholarship. He is currently a guest researcher at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam and a visiting researcher at Leiden University.
Professor, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
Marjolein graduated in Agricultural sciences (Master, 1991) and Applied Biological Sciences (PhD, 2001) at Ghent University, Belgium. She first specialised in native seed production to restore degraded arid lands, with field experience dating back to 1992 in collecting, evaluating and using native perennial grasses and legumes in South-Tunisia. She then completed a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellowship at the Environmental Change Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway on sustainable grazing of turlough grasslands. Turloughs are karst wetlands protected by the EU. This post-doc enabled her to get back in touch with the debate on nature conservation versus food production on European farmland.
Since joining the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) in 2006, Marjolein’s research interests have broadened beyond native seed production and turlough grazing but both her older and newer work can be united under the banner of agroecology. Currently she teaches and leads research on agroforestry, repeasantization, alternative cereal networks, urban agriculture and soil health, always with an emphasis on the human dimension of food systems, in both temperate and tropical conditions. Through several recent Participatory Action Research projects on food resilience in urban environments (from 2015 on), the issue of the cooptation of agroecology, both in research and in (higher) education have added a new dimension to agroecology, because of the essentially extractivist nature of academic research and the paradoxes arising if one tries to avoid this new extractivism.
Hanna-Kaisa Tiainen (born 1984) is a Finnish performance maker. She graduated from RITCS (Brussels) in 2015 and has been developing since site specific performances with an ecological approach. She believes that personal is political and that structures are an essential part of artistic work. More info on hannakaisatiainen.weebly.com.
Veera-Maija Murtola - Scenographer (born 1980 Oulu, Finland) completed her MA degree in 2009 from the University of Art and design Helsinki, department of scenography. Murtola works actively and multi professionally as a visual designer in the fields of theatre, dance and performative arts. Her work consists of set and spatial design, costume design and video design for performances. She has worked around Finland in large municipal theatres as well as small, alternative venues and site-specific projects.
"Another center: Academia is a performative lecture-spectacle made especially for WERN2018. Another center: Academia is the fourth part of a series of site-specific performances that explore the city dwellers' relation to nature. It combines philosophical thinking to humorous and multi sensorial elements. Another center: Academia tries to find ways to be self-sufficient in urban environment and broaden the circle of empathy to salads and beyond."
Larry Lohmann is an activist scholar who has written on politics, environment, geography, accounting, Asian studies, law, science studies and development. A member of the advisory board of the World Rainforest Movement, he is currently trying to come to an integrated understanding of how thermodynamic energy, ecosystem service exchange and everyday and mechanized linguistic interpretive work are organized in the service of surplus extraction. Based at The Corner House, UK, he has also lived in Thailand, the US and Ecuador.
Soumitra Ghosh is a social activist and independent researcher based in North Bengal, India. Soumitra has been working among the forest communities of North Bengal and India for more than last two decades, and has intermittently contributed research papers on forest and climate change issues to various journals and anthologies.
Uddhab Pd. Pyakurel is an Assistant Professor of Political Sociology at the Kathmandu University. He contributes commentaries and articles to newspapers and journals on environmental justice, social movements, social inclusion/exclusion, state restructuring, and other socio-political issues. He is a member of International Council of World Social Forum and volunteers for various movement organizations including South Asian Dialogues on Ecological Democracy (SADED) and Network Institute for Global Democracy (NIGD). Pyakurel has authored, co-authored and edited monographs and books and is the Managing Editor of Nepali Journal of Contemporary Studies.
Khu Khu Ju is a land right activist and an activist researcher. In the past she has been the spokesperson for the Karen Human Rights Group. Currently she is dedicating most of her time to the work with Land in Our Hands network (LIOH). LIOH is an initiative of small-scale farmers and local farmer organizations that works for land tenure rights of small-scale farmers and fisherfolk, and particularly for women and ethnic communities. Khu Khu Ju has co-authored a report ‘Meaning of Land in Myanmar’ published by the Transnational Institute.
Kyi Phyo is an energy activist and Myanmar coordinator of the Mekong Energy and Ecology Network (MEE Net). In Myanmar several large-scale energy projects are being planned. Social movements have been successful in stopping some of the most destructive ones. Kyi Phyo has worked closely with grassroots activists and local residents in the Irrawaddy and Salween river basins building networks to confront destructive hydropower projects and to advocate for more just and sustainable ways of using the rivers. MEE Net also constructs alternative energy plans that have been influential, for example, in the Shan state.
Marko Ulvila engages with various concerns as a writer and an organizer. He takes special interest in democracy, ecological sustainability, de-growth debates and global equity. Over the years he has been part of a number of civil society processes in Europe, East Africa and South Asia pertaining to environment and post-growth futures. The World Social Forum, the Green Party and the Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam Network are particularly dear to his heart. In 2009 he co-edited the book Sustainable Futures: Replacing Growth Imperative and Hierarchies with Sustainable Ways (Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, 2009). Currently Marko chairs the Siemenpuu Foundation in Finland.
Markus Kröger is an Associate Professor in Development Studies, Faculty of Social Science, and Member of the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, University of Helsinki. His research has focused on the political economy of development and natural resource extraction, especially in Latin America, India, and the Arctic. He is the author of Contentious agency and natural resource politics, and a host of articles on world-ecology, forest policy, global forestry, Brazilian political economy, Latin American environmental politics, mining, and resistance to extractivism. He is currently studying the political economies of deforestation and the conflicts related to industrial forestry.
Maria Ehrnström-Fuentes is a postdoctoral researcher in Management and Organisation at Hanken School of Economics and University of Tampere. Her PhD titled ‘Legitimacy in the Pluriverse’, investigated the politics between global forestry corporations and local communities in Chile and Uruguay, and how practices such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and stakeholder dialogues impact the world-making processes of communities affected by forestry. Her research interests also include the organizing and politics of local food networks and grassroots organizations in the Nordic countries.
Teivo Teivainen is Professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki. His research includes questions about global political economy and transnational social movements. One of his current projects is about the political and ecological impact of Finnish pulp investments in Uruguay. His awards range from Hopkins Award of the American Sociological Association for his book Enter Economism, Exit Politics (published by Zed Books in 2002) to Amartya Sen Prize of Yale University for the article, coauthored with Matti Ylönen, “Politics of Intra-firm Trade” (published in New Political Economy in 2018). In between, he has received Academy of Finland Recognition Award, Pro Feminism Award, JV Snellman Public Information Award, and Ovet Award for advancing knowledge about Russia in Finland (a theme he sometimes explores through World Political City Walks).