Bio notes

Ana Rita Alves is an anthropologist (2008), holds a master's degree in Migration, Inter-Ethnicity and Transnationalism, and a PhD in Human Rights in Contemporary Societies (2023). Her involvement with different disciplines, from anthropology to critical race theory and urban studies, has been fundamental in analysing processes of anti-Black and anti-Roma political violence in Portugal in the fields of epistemology, housing and justice, resulting in numerous publications, including the book ‘Quando Ninguém Podia Ficar: Racismo, Habitação e Território’ (When No One Could Stay: Racism, Housing and Territory) (Tigre de Papel, 2021). She is currently a researcher on the project "AGRRIN - Generating Bodies: from aggression to insurgency. Contributions to a decolonial pedagogy" (FCT, 2023-2026) at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Education and Development (CeiED - Lusófona University) and a collaborating researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES - University of Coimbra).

Claudia Fonseca Alfaro is a postcolonial and feminist urban scholar with an interest in investigating the present-day entanglements of postcolonial remains, uneven development, and urbanization in the inconspicuous places of the global South. Her academic journey has been driven by a curiosity to unpack the complex dynamics of inequality and capitalism, emphasizing everyday life while considering global processes. Claudia’s work interrogates the socio-spatial manifestations of hidden types of urbanization and exposes their present-day entanglements with colonial legacies, environmental inequalities, and racializing practices. Claudia is the author of Producing Mayaland: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism (2023) and has published widely on the production of space and its intersections with global commodity chains, infrastructure-led development models, and smart urbanism.

Giulia Torino is an urban scholar trained in architecture, urban design, and social theory, working at the intersection of city design, governance, sociology, and geography. Her research combines ethnographic, visual, and critical mixed methods to examine cities as sites of movement, power, inequality, and collective world-making, with a focus on everyday politics, urbanisation, and the racial political economy of governance in Latin America (Bogotá/Colombia) and the Central Mediterranean (Southern Italy). Often drawing on collaborations with social leaders, communities, artists, and other academics, she explores how racial capitalism and coloniality can reframe the understanding of urban inequality and spatial injustice, asking what we can learn from informal social infrastructures of care that resist extraction and displacement, proposing new common senses and spatialities. From August 2025, she is Assistant Professor of Urban Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), after previous roles at King’s College London, the University of Cambridge, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá), Amnesty International, and the New York City’s Department of City Planning.

Lorena Melgaço is an associate senior lecturer at the Department of Human Geography at Lund University. She has previously worked at Plymouth, Birmingham, and Malmö universities as a researcher. Her research interests include the micropolitics of socio-spatial and technological peripheralisation in the postcolony; the intersections of technological dependency, capitalist production of space, and the socio-environmental crisis: smart cities; and the challenges of planning education and practice from a decolonial perspective.

Luana Xavier Pinto Coelho | Researcher in the Postgraduate Program in Law at the University of Brasilia (UnB), coordinator of the PROPRACIAL project “Race, law, and property: legal subjectivity and the racial property regime in Brazil” (2025-2028). Postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra with the project S-DREAM - The self-segregation dream: analysis of racial property regimes and urban planning in Nova Lima, Brazil (2024-2025). PhD in Human Rights in Contemporary Societies from the same university. Graduate in Law (UFOP/Brazil) and Master's in International Cooperation and Urban Development (IUG-UPMF, Grenoble/France and TUD, Darmstadt/Germany). She has conducted research and published in the areas of urban studies, critical race theory, human rights and urban law. Her current area of interest is understanding urban racial segregation, especially the relationship between race, law and space.

Margarida de Cássia Campos | Education worker. Currently a visiting researcher at the University of Coimbra, working on the theme ‘Geographical space, memories and coloniality’ between March 2025 and February 2026. She completed a postdoctoral internship at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra (between March 2019 and February 2020) with the research topic ‘Affirmative action policies for admission to higher education: a comparative analysis between Brazil, France and Portugal’. PhD in Geography from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (2010). Master's degree in Environment and Development from the State University of Londrina (2003), graduated with a degree in Geography (2000) and a Bachelor's degree (2002). Currently an Associate Professor B in the Geography Teaching Degree course, the Specialisation in Geography Teaching course and a lecturer on the postgraduate course - Master's and Doctorate in Geography - UEL. Lecturer on the Professional Master's Programme in Network Sociology at UEL and collaborating lecturer on the Postgraduate Programme in Social Work at the Federal University of Bahia. She conducts research on the following topics: Decolonial Geography, Geography Education; Affirmative Action Policies for Higher Education; Gender Studies and Education; Decolonial and Anti-Racist Education and Black Feminism.

Ylver Mosquera Vallejo | Geographer, Doctor of Geography from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Associate professor at the University of Antioquia, Colombia. Interested in the processes of constructing spatiality in Afro-descendant communities.

Silvia Rodríguez Maeso | With a PhD in Political Sociology (University of the Basque Country), Silvia is a senior researcher at CES and deputy coordinator of the ‘Democracy, Justice and Human Rights’ research area. Silvia is co-coordinator of the Doctoral Programme ‘Human Rights in Contemporary Societies’ (CES/IIIUC) and teaches in the Programme ‘Sociology of the State, Law and Justice’ (CES/FEUC). She was coordinator of the POLITICS project - ‘The politics of (anti)racism in Europe and Latin America: knowledge production, political decision-making and collective struggles’ (ERC-Consolidator Grant, 2017-2022).

Ulises Moreno-Tabarez is a human geographer from Guerrero, Mexico. His research focuses on spectral commons, coastal urbanisation, and Afro-indigenous solidarities in the face of the climate crisis and ethno-racial capitalism. He currently coordinates the Afro-Indigenous Spectralities project (SECIHTI-UAGro, IJURR Foundation) and is editor of City magazine.