Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology, University of Coimbra (Portugal), and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned an LL.M and J.S.D. from Yale University and holds the Degree of Doctor of Laws, Honoris Causa, by McGill University. He is director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and has written and published widely on the issues of globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, social movements and the World Social Forum. He has been awarded several prizes, most recently the Science and Technology Prize of Mexico, 2010, and the Kalven Jr. Prize of the Law and Society Association, 2011.
His most recent project – ALICE: Leading Europe to a New Way of Sharing the World Experiences – is funded by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (ERC), one of the most prestigious and highly competitive international financial institutes for scientific excellence in Europe. The project was initiated in July 2011 and will continue for the next five years.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos has published widely on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, and human rights in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, and Chinese.

Elísio Macamo
Elísio Macamo is Tenure Track Assistant Professor of African Studies at the University of Basel (since October 2009). Previously, he taught development sociology at the University of Bayreuth, where he was a founding member of the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies. He was born and grew up in Mozambique. He studied in Maputo (Mozambique), Salford and London (England) and Bayreuth (Germany). He holds an MA degree in Translation and Interpreting (Salford), an MA degree in Sociology and Social Policy (University of North London) and a PhD and “Habilitation” in General Sociology (University of Bayreuth). He was Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Bayreuth, Research Fellow at the Centre for African Studies in Lisbon (Portugal), AGORA-Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin and a visiting lecturer at Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique. He regularly offers methodological workshops to Portuguese speaking African doctoral students on behalf of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa).

José Manuel Mendes
José Manuel Mendes holds a PhD in Sociology by the School of Economics of the University of Coimbra, where he is an Assistant Professor.
He is also researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, where he has been working in the fields of inequalities, social mobility, social movements and collective action and, more recently, on the themes of risk and social vulnerability.
He coordinates the Risk Observatory (OSIRIS) of the Centre for Social Studies.