Centro Maria Sibylla Merian
Although contexts and biotechnologies have changed in recent decades, the mechanisms and objectives of biopolitics remain similar; for example, discarding, marginalization, and exclusion continue to be present as forms of social death. The texts collected in this book address strategies for confronting policies of intervention on bodies, overcoming necropolitics, and fighting for life.
Migration in Latin America and Caribbean is no longer a one-way phenomenon toward the United States, but has become a global, complex, and multiscale experience linked to contemporary crises that reinforce each other: inequalities, climate change, conflicts, pandemics, and technological transformations. This book explores the causes, implications, and tensions of these mobilities, considering the structural, institutional, environmental, and cultural factors that shape them, as well as their gender, ethnic, and class dimensions.
Selina Rasch studied English and American Studies and is a wholesale and foreign trade manager. She is currently enrolled in the MPA master's programme at the Management School of the University of Kassel. Since August 2025, she is administrative coordinator of the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) in Kassel.
Susana Carmona Castillo is an assistant professor at University College Maastricht, where she researches development anthropology and political ecology with a focus on mining and extractive industries in Latin America and the Global South. Her work analyzes corporate legitimization strategies, environmental controversies and socio-economic impacts of mining. Before joining Maastricht University, she was a researcher at Ruhr University Bochum and obtained her PhD at the Universidad de los Andes with a dissertation on the case of coal mining in La Guajira, Colombia.
Luis Bertola holds a PhD in Economic History from the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), is Professor of History and Economic and Social Development at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of the Republic. He was Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Pro-Rector of Research at the University of the Republic and Director of the National Agency for Innovation and Research (ANII).
Mario di Paolantonio holds a PhD in Education from the University of Toronto. He is currently an associate professor at York University in Canada. He specializes in education issues and, additionally, in the interstices between education and democracy and between education and justice.
Amparo Marroquín is Professor of the Department of Communication and Culture at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA) since 1997. She has specialized in cultural studies (narratives of memory, migration and violence in El Salvador); and communication studies from Latin America (political communication narratives and media literacy). She has been a visiting professor at various universities in the region. She is currently the dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the UCA.
Tulia Falleti holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (Northwestern University).
Harald Fuhr has been Professor of International Politics at the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Potsdam. His research focuses on international climate change policies and carbon governance, public sector reforms, decentralization and local governance in developing countries. He has also advised the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the European Union, the OECD Development Centre, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme.
Consuelo Naranjo Orovio is a research professor at the Institute of History of the CSIC in Spain. Between 2011 and 2019 she was Director of the Institute of History of the CSIC, and Director of the Center for Human and Social Sciences of the CSIC between 2012-2013 and 2018-2019. She is a Foreign Corresponding Member of several academies: Academia de la Historia de Cuba, Academia Mexicana de Ciencias and Academia Dominicana de la Historia.
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