Marlie Holtzhausen is in the process of finishing her PhD in Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Her research interests focus on exploring relational approaches in development and including methods that are interdisciplinary. She is a Relational Practitioner affiliated with the Relationships Foundation in Cambridge, UK. She has worked as a tutor and assistant lecturer at the University of Pretoria from 2011 to 2017 and has also been involved within the NGO sector since 2015. She has worked on several research projects, including a co-authored book chapter funded by the Melon Foundation on social cohesion in South Africa. In September 2018, she went to an international workshop in Germany, Bonn on “Mobilization for Change: Promoting and Defending Justice for Marginalized People” hosted by the Right to Livelihood College at the Center for Development Research (ZEF). She also went to Philipps-University in Marburg in 2019 for a six-month In-Country Research Scholarship funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and worked closely with the Centre of Conflict Studies.

Lena Schlegel holds a top grade M.A. degree in Peace Studies and International Relations from the University of Tübingen. For her thesis “Decarbonising the Human – a posthumanist epistemic critique and more-than-human ethics for low-carbon transitions” she was awarded the Sustainability Price for outstanding contributions to research on sustainable development. She currently works in an interdisciplinary EU2020 project at the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW). Her research is focussed on New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist perspectives on human-nature relations, care ethics, and sustainability transitions. In her PhD project she is addressing relations of care between humans and nature in the context of the 2019/20 Australian Bushfires.

Stefan Ortiz-Przychodzka is an Economist (social and ecological) from the National University of Colombia, with a Ms. in Development Studies from Sorbonne University – Paris. In the last 8 years, he worked as a researcher in socio-environmental issues, including the assessment of land tenure conflicts in Colombia, agroecology and sustainable agriculture, social movements in rural areas and local governance in campesino and indigenous communities. He was recently appointed as a Research Associate and PhD student in the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, where he is analyzing the social and cultural constructions of plural economies in Bolivia and their link to biocultural diversity.

Manuela Arruda Galindo is a PhD candidate in the Postgraduate Program in Communication at the Cultural and Media Studies Department, at Federal Fluminense University - Rio de Janeiro, supervised by Professor Paula Sibilia. Her research investigates different aspects of contemporary culture, through the relationships between image, media, technology, time and bodies, in a genealogical perspective. As previous research interests, Galindo investigated the rise and dissemination of selfies, a practice which was so rapidly incorporated into amateur photography, deeply connected to digital technology and social media, but specially, was stimulated and reinforced as a ritual in contemporary society. On her current research, Galindo addresses social media tools and apps dedicated to ephemeral content, and the tensions between the desire for visibility, urgent visualization and imminent erasure.