Flávio Almada (LBC Soldjah) is a member of the board of directors in the Association Moinho da Juventude where he works as education assistant. He is also one of the founding members of the Black Movement ‘Plataforma Gueto’ (Lisbon). Flávio holds a B.A. in Translation and Creative Writing by the Lusófona University (2013). He worked as a social worker within the project ‘Nu Kré’ (Programme ‘Escolhas’/ Association Solidariedade Social Alto Cova da Moura/Association Moinho da Juventude) in 2014. He has completed training courses on Labour Law (2008-2010) and Sociocultural Animation of Public Spaces (2007) at the Intercultural School for Training and Sports (Lisbon), on Archives, Libraries and Resource Centres (Autonomy University of Lisbon/Association Moinho da Juventude, 2007); and training in the techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed as a tool for inclusion with the Carnide Theatre Group (Lisbon, 2007).
Marta Araújo holds a PhD in Sociology of Education from the University of London (2003) and she is Principal Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) - Associate Laboratory, where she lectures in the PhD Programmes Democracy in the 21st Century (CES/FEUC) and 'Language and Heterodoxies: History, Poetics and Social Practices' (CES/FLUC). She is also Guest Lecturer at the Black Europe Summer School (IIRE, Amsterdam). Marta is currently a member of the Editorial Board of international publications on sociology, education and 'race'. Her research interests centre on the (re)production and challenging of racism and Eurocentrism, in two complementary lines of research: 1) race/power, history and textbooks; 2) public policy, education, anti-racist and decolonial struggles. From 2008 to 2012, Marta coordinated a project entitled 'Race' and Africa in Portugal: a study on history textbooks, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. From 2010 to 2013, she co-coordinated the European Project 'The Semantics of Tolerance and (Anti-)Racism: public bodies and civil society in comparative perspective', funded by the European Commission (FP7). Marta has published internationally, and she recently edited, with Silvia R. Maeso, the collection 'Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge: Debates on History and Power in Europe and the Americas', by Palgrave MacMillan (2015). Her most recent article, entitled 'A very 'prudent integration': white flight, school segregation and the depoliticization of (anti)racism', was published in the journal Race, Ethnicity and Education, in the UK.
Kevin Bismark Cobham is a Cambridge educated criminal defence lawyer who also defines himself as a movement lawyer, pan-Africanist and community activist and is from London. He is a member of the London Campaign Against Police and State Violence, a family-led campaign against all forms of police and state brutality against communities in South London and beyond.
Piménio Ferreira’s parents are Portuguese Roma that work in the street markets. He obtained a BSc and MSc degrees in Physics Engineering by the Faculty of Science of the University of Lisbon. He currently works at the Technological and Nuclear Campus (High Technical Institute – IST, Loures) as a research fellow. He has worked in a European research project in collaboration with CERN in the area of neutron physics (2012-2014) and he is now participating in a project funded by the Portuguese FCT in the area of medical physics (since 2014). His work as an activist was developed since I became aware of the inequalities and injustice that Roma people are subjected to in comparison to non-Roma, caused by Antiziganism or Romaphobia. Some of his activities in this field include: the creation of the blog Cigano-TV, aiming to the demystification of Roma culture and the denunciation of life conditions of the Roma community in contrast to the stereotyped and prejudiced image presented by the media and assumed by the general society; the association with Roma and non-Roma activists and mediators that struggle against discrimination; the participation in the I Meeting of Roma Young Students and their Families and in the TV programme Pros e Contras (RTP) dedicated to the topic of racism; the participation in the training workshop organised by SOS Racismo in Tocha (2014). He is currently a guest member of the Advisory and Evaluation Committee of the project Opre Chavale promoted by Letras Nómadas and PPdM, focused on the promotion and support of young Roma students to have access to higher education.
Ruthie Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies at the Graduate Center. She has many honours and awards, and has delivered invited lectures at universities and cultural institutions around the world. Among many publications, her prize-winning book is Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007). Current projects include a second edition of Golden Gulag, as well as several other book projects: Fatal Couplings: Essays on Motion, Racial Capitalism, and the Black Radical Tradition; and Big Things: Reconfigured Landscapes and the Infrastructure of Feeling. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and The Caribbean (IRADAC), and serves on the boards of many social justice, cultural, and scholarly formations in the US, Europe, and West Asia. She was a founding member of Critical Resistance, California Prison Moratorium Project, and other grassroots organizations.
Bruno Gonçalves, 39 years old, was born in Coimbra. He is member of a Roma community and has been socio-cultural mediator for 16 years. Bruno is also mediator trainer and national delegate of the ROMED Programme (Council of Europe) and Vice-President of Letras Nómadas – Association for Research and Reinforcement of Roma Communities. From 2010 to 2012 he was a member of the Commission for Equality and against Racial Discrimination(CICDR) in Portugal. He has also been a founding member and first president of the Roma Association of Coimbra. Since 1998 he has been an activist in SOS Racismo-Portugal. He is the author of the children’s book: A História do Ciganinho Chico.
Silvia Rodríguez Maeso is Principal Researcher at CES-Associated Laboratory and part of the Research Group on Democracy, Citizenship and Law (DECIDe). Currently, she is Vice-President of the Scientific Board. Silvia holds a PhD in Political Sociology (University of the Basque Country) and she lectures in the PhD Programmes: "Democracy in the 21st Century" (FEUC/CES); and in the International Master "Roads to Democracy(ies)" (UC/University of Siegen). She has been executive coordinator of the project TOLERACE - The semantics of tolerance and (anti-)racism: public bodies and civil society in comparative perspective (UE, FP7; 2010-2013: http://www.ces.uc.pt/projectos/tolerace/pages/pt/about-tolerace.php).
Her main research and teaching interests have centred on the following areas: social theory, racism and anti-racism in European contexts; Eurocentrism and Knowledge production; Truth Commissions in Latin American contexts. Her most recent publication are: (with Marta Araújo) the edited collection Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge: Debates on History and Power in Europe and the Americas, Palgrave MacMillan (2015); "'Civilising' the Roma? The depoliticisation of (anti-)racism within the politics of integration", Identities. Global Studies in Culture and Power (2015); (with Beatriz Cavia) ‘Esquivando el racismo: el paradigma de la "integración" en las sociedades europeas y vasca contemporáneas’, in I. Irazutza and M. Martínez (org.), De la Identidad a la Vulnerabilidad. Alteridad e integración en el País Vasco contemporáneo. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra (2014).
Mehdi Meftah is one of the founding members of the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic (PIR). Mehdi was born in Morocco and he has been socialized into politics by his family at an early age. His father, of rural origins, has struggled against colonialism within the Istiqal Party or Independence Party, and then in the National Union of Popular Forces led by Mehdi Ben Barka at that time. His grandfather Mostafa, has been a member of the movement 23 of March and was imprisoned for 10 years due to his opposition to the post-colonial regime of Hassan II. After graduating in Linguistics by the Department of Literature and Arab language in Casablanca, he decided to migrate to France in 1990 in order to continue his academic education where he obtained a PhD in Psycholinguistics (1998). He has been involved since the end of the 1990s in the ‘committees Pro-Palestine’ and became one of the main leaders of the Coordination Ile-de-France of the Committees that brought together a network of committees in the peripheral neighborhoods of Paris. He has also organised numerous popular mobilisations in support of the Palestinian cause. In 2005, Mehdi was one of the authors of the Call of the Indigenous of the Republic and one of the leaders of the PIR, founded in 2010, a political party that aims to gather the populations that come from the history of colonialism and enslavement within a political organisation able to demolish the colonial system established by the French Republic, both internally and within the framework of its relationship with the Third World.
Kwame Nimako is the founder and director of the Summer School on Black Europe that has taken place in Amsterdam since 2008 and a visiting professor at the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught International Relations and Race and Ethnic Relations for more than 25 years at the University of Amsterdam. He has also acted as an adviser and rapporteur for several private and public institutions, including the Amsterdam Municipal Council and the Dutch Ministry of Home Affairs. He is the author or co-author of over 30 books, reports and guidebooks on economic development, ethnic relations, social policy, urban renewal and migration. His works include: The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (with Glenn Willemsen) (London, Pluto Press, 2011); “Nkrumah, African Awakening and Neo-colonialism: How Black America awakened Nkrumah and Nkrumah awakened Black America”, in: The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research (Vol 40, No.2, Summer 2010); “Theorizing Black Europe and African Diaspora: Implications for Citizenship, Nativism and Xenophobia” (with Stephen Small) In: Black Europe and the African Diaspora: ed. D. C. Hine, T. D. Keaton & S. Small (University of Illinois Press, 2009).
Benjamin Xavier de Paula is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES-UC), funded by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel in Brazil (CAPES) and lecturer at the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU). Benjamin holds a BA in History by the São Paulo State University (2000), a MA in Education by the University of São Paulo (2005) and a PhD in Education by the UFU (2013). He has professional experience in the areas of History and Education, in particular: the teaching of history, Afro-Brazilian history and culture, education policies, training for teachers. His main publications are: (2014), "10 years of the federal law no. 10.639/2003 and the teacher training: a view of scientific research ", Educação e Pesquisa, 40 (2); (2012), "La enseñanza de la historia y cultura de África y afrobrasileña en Brasil", Iber (Barcelona), 72 (2); (2011), “Historia y cultura afro-brasileña y la contribución de las poblaciones de matrices africanas en Brasil”, Estudios Históricos (Rivera), 7 (1); (2011), “O movimento hip hop e a construção da identidade negra-juvenil”, Revista da Associação Brasileira de Pesquisadores(as) Negros(as) - ABPN, 2 (1).
Mario Espinosa Pino is Graduate in Philosophy, editor, activist and social researcher. His main fields of research are Marxism, Political Philosophy, Social Movements and the thought of Baruch Spinoza. He is completing his PhD about the critique of political economy in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, and has been working on Marxism from a non-Eurocentric framework, deepening into post-colonial analysis and the World-system theory. He has participated in different collective works like Spinoza Contemporáneo (Tierradenadie, 2009) – a book of which is also editor –, Hacer vivir, dejar morir. Biopolítica y Capitalismo (Arbor/Catarata, 2010) and, recently, Constelaciones Intempestivas (Biblioteca Nueva, 2015). He is editor of two Karl Marx’s books in Spanish: Contribución a la crítica de la economía política (Minerva, 2010) and Artículos periodísticos, both texts accompanied with new introductions and critic commentaries. During 2013 and 2014 he conducted – with Julio Martínez Cava-Aguilar– two interrelated research projects: the first about the Spanish 15M Movement (The Spanish Revolt: defying the crisis from below) and the second about Migration, Racism and Social Movements in Spain (In and Out: Stories between borders).
Anabela Rodrigues is a Coringa and co-coordinator of theAssociation Theatre of the Oppressed Group in Lisbon and one of the founding members of the Laboratory AMI-AFRO, an innovative aesthetic experience that engages with the specificity of oppression faced by Afro-descendants; silenced topics such as racial, sex and class discrimination are approached from an artistic approach. Anabela is a member of ‘Together’ a European network of the Theatre of the Oppressed (including groups from Portugal, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Croation and the United Kingdom); she has been coordinator of activities at the Cultural Association Moinho da Juventude (1997-2008) and the Francis Obikwelu Foundation (2008-2009) in Lisbon. She is the descendent of immigrants, a mother, a poet and an activist.
Katy P. Sian is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. She completed her PhD in 2009 at the University of Leeds in the School of Sociology and Social Policy. From 2010-2012 Katy worked on the TOLERACE project (FP7) as a post-doctoral researcher in the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS) University of Leeds. She moved to the University of Manchester in 2012 where she held a lecturing position in Sociology before taking up a Hallsworth Research Fellowship in 2013. Katy has held visiting research posts at the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society (CSRS) at the University of Victoria, Canada. Katy is the author of, Conversations in Postcolonial Thought (2014) New York: Palgrave; Unsettling Sikh and Muslim Conflict: Mistaken Identities, Forced Conversions, and Postcolonial Formations (2013) Lanham: Lexington Books; and co-author of, Racism, Governance, and Public Policy: Beyond Human Rights (2013) London: Routledge. Her research interests include, postcolonial studies; critical race theory; inter-ethnic relations; Sikh studies; Islamophobia and the war on terror; religion and identity; migration and diaspora.
Marcos Silva holds a MA in Educational Psychology; he is currently a PhD candidate of the Post-Graduate Programme in Social Psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), where he is a member of the Research Group on Gender, Race and Age (NEGRI). He is a visiting PhD student at the Centre for Social Studies (CES-UC), in the Research Group on Democracy, Citizenship and Law (DECIDe), with funding from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel in Brazil (CAPES). His research and teaching interests centre on the areas of race relations and racism from an interdisciplinary approach that relates Education, Social Psychology and Sociology; more specifically, his research focuses on youth (education, family and employment) and educational trajectories of black researchers. His most recent publications are: “Percepções e trajetória de vida no trabalho”. Psicologia Argumento, PUC-PR, Brasil, 2015;“Relações raciais no núcleo de estudos de gênero, raça e idade (NEGRI): um balanço inicial (1992-2014)” Volume 10, Nº 2, 2015, Jataí-GO; “Alternativas juvenis” Itinerarius Reflectionis,UFG, Goias, Brasil, 2012. “Um olhar sobre hiperatividade de professores em serviço” Revista Delfos/FNC, Carapibuíba,SP,2012; Inserção laboral de jovens: repercussões do cotidiano familiar e escolar”, Itinerarius Reflectionis, UFG, Goias, 2011.
