Participants

Doctor in Discourse Analysis from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.  He is currently attached as a full time professor in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Guadalajara. From 2017 to 2023 he has been Co-Director of the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies, in Guadalajara and member of the Center's Board of Directors. His lines of research are discourse analysis, discrimination, violence, health, environment in narratives originating from historically vulnerable groups.

Alexandra Cuffel is professor of Jewish Religion in Past and Present Times at the Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum. She received several fellowships, among them a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2007, the Women’s Studies in Religion Fellowship from Harvard Divinity School in 2006, and a fellowship from the Dorot Foundation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1996.

Werner Gephart is a legal scholar, sociologist, and artist. He is Founding Director of the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” and has additionally held numerous visiting professorships around the world, among others the Fulbright Distinguished Chair for German Studies at Washington University, St. Louis, a visiting professorship at the IDC (Herzlyia, Israel) and numerous invitations as professor in Tunis; in addition he has held the Chaire Alfred Grosser at SciencesPo, Paris.

Martin Fuchs, trained in Sociology and Anthropology, Professor for Indian Religious History, Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany. Member, and temporarily Director, of the M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS:MP) in Delhi, India. 

Olaf Kaltmeier is professor of Iberoamerican History at the University of Bielefeld. He serves as director of CALAS-Maria Sybilla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studing in the Humanities and Social Science as well as spokesperson of the BMBF. At the University of Bielefeld, he serves on the Executive Board for the Center for Interamerican Studies (CIAS), as coordinator (with W. Raussert) of the BMBF project "The Americas as a Space of Entanglement" and is coordinator of the research area in the SFB 1288 "Practices of Comparing".

Sarah Corona Berkin received a doctorate in communication from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. She is currently a professor at the University of Guadalajara, a position she previously held at the Metropolitan Autonomous University at its Xochimilco campus. She has conducted research on written and visual communication in different social groups, intercultural education and communication, indigenous education, the history of books published by the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), as well as reading in distinct social groups. 

Sighard Neckel is professor of Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg and spokesperson of the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Futures of Sustainability”. Before taking his chair at Hamburg University, he held professorships for sociological theory at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Vienna and was research director at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. 

Mara Viveros Vigoya is a doctor in Anthropology, School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences of Paris (EHESS); Master in Latin American Studies (IHEAL, Paris III), and an economist at the National University of Colombia. Titular Professor of the Faculty of Human Sciences of the National University of Colombia, she has taught and developed a good part of her research projects since 1998 in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Gender Studies, where she was a director in 2010-2012 and 2016-2018.

Heidi Hein-Kircher earned her M.A. and PhD from Heinrich Heine-University in Düsseldorf. Working on the research staff of the Herder-Institute for Historical Research in East Central Europe – Member of the Leibniz-Association in Marburg, Germany since 2003, she has became the head of the department “Academic Forum” in 2009. In her research, she focuses on urban history (emerging cities) of the 19th and 20th in East Central Europe in regard to modernization, knowledge transfer, and nationalization as well as historical critical security and conflict studies.