Notes on the Contributors

Mahmoud Al-Zayed is a literary scholar of comparative and world literatures, working across different theoretical and literary traditions with a focus on south-south affinities and connections across South Asia, Africa(na), and the Arab and Islamicate World. He works at the intersections of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial traditions of thought and practice. He writes on activism, aesthetics, ethics, decolonisation, philosophies of liberation, and intellectual history and social theory from contemporary Arab and Muslim thought. He is a postdoctoral research associate and an Einstein Researcher at the Institute of Islamic Studies, and Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, Freie Universität Berlin. Al-Zayed studied English language and Literature in Homs, Syria, and before moving to Berlin, he spent the last decade studying and researching as an Indian Council for Cultural Relations fellow, at Jamia Millia Islamia, a Central University, New Delhi, India.

Bernardo Bianchi is a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo. He serves as a researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, where he coordinates the Alexander von Humboldt project ‘Paradoxes of Emancipation’. Prior to this, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. He co-edited the volume Materialism and Politics, published by ICI Berlin Press in 2021. His primary research interests include Political Philosophy, History of Philosophy, and Contemporary Political Theory.

Michela Coletta is an Assistant Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick. She is currently Marie Curie Fellow in Global History at Freie Universität Berlin and an Affiliated Fellow at ICI Berlin (2022–24). She has a PhD in History from University College London and has held positions at King’s College London, the University of Bristol, the University of London’s Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Universidad Pablo de Olavide. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Aalborg and at the Rachel Carson Center. Coletta’s first monograph, Decadent Modernity: Civilisation and Latinidad in Spanish America, 1880–1920 (2018), shows the relevance of cultural frameworks of modernity in the emergence of Latin America as a geo-political region. She has also co-edited the volume Provincialising Nature: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Politics of the Environment in Latin America (2016) and has published several articles at the intersection of cultural and intellectual history, environmental history, social and political theory, and the environmental humanities. Her current work on Buen Vivir explores the possibility of tracing anti-extractivist epistemologies across north-south boundaries.

Iracema Dulley works as an anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and creative writer. She holds a BA in philosophy and a PhD in social anthropology from the University of São Paulo and is currently Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Her research considers processes of subject constitution from an interdisciplinary perspective. She is the author of books including On the Emic Gesture (Routledge, 2019), Os nomes dos outros (Humanitas, 2015), and Deus é feiticeiro (Annablume, 2010). Recent publications include: ‘Naming Others: Translation and Subject Constitution in the Central Highlands of Angola (1926–1961)’ in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 64, Issue 2 (April 2022), pp. 363–93; ‘Chronicles of Bailundo: A Fragmentary Account in Umbundu of Life Before and After Portuguese Colonial Rule’ in Africa, Vol. 91, Issue 5 (November 2021), pp. 713–41; ‘The Voice in Rape’, in European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 9, Issue 2 (2022); ‘Feitiço/Umbanda’, in Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South, ed. Dilip Menon (Routledge, 2022); and ‘The Case and the Signifier: Generalization in Freud’s Rat Man’, in The Case for Reduction, ed. Christopher Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger (ICI Berlin Press, 2022).

Şirin Fulya Erensoy is a film and media scholar, based between Istanbul and Berlin. Her research focuses on video activism, women and documentary filmmaking, and genre cinema. She has experience as a lecturer in Film and Television at various institutions in Turkey and recently completed her Marie Curie Individual post-doctoral fellowship at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf (September 2021–August 2023). She supplements her academic work with ongoing practices in documentary film production, film curation, and journalism. Şirin has curated numerous art and film events in cooperation with institutions in Berlin, including the Maxim Gorki Theatre, and the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien and has been involved in festivals such as the Hive International Short Film Days and the Sehsüchte International Student Film Festival. Her professional journey also includes her role as anchor for the English news-bulletin ‘This Week’ in Turkey on the alternative digital media platform Medyascope TV. In addition to her roles in media and academia, Erensoy has worked on international film projects in various capacities such as editing, producing, translating, and researching. Furthermore, she has directed her own short films and videos, some of which have received funding from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey, the Turkish Foundation of Cinema and Audiovisual Culture, and Goethe Institut Istanbul.

Firoozeh Farvardin is a feminist scholar and sociologist based in Berlin. She is researching and writing on gender/sexual (counter)strategies of authoritarian neoliberalism in Iran as a postdoc fellow at IRGAC (International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter Strategy), Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, hosted by the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is also a MERGE (Migration and the Middle East Research Network) affiliated researcher and a guest lecturer at the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research (BIM), where her research revolves around the intersection of mobility and mobilization, as well as knowledge production about and from the Middle East. In 2023, she co-curated an internationalist gathering of feminist movements and scholars from the Global South in Berlin: ‘Beyond Equality: Feminisms Reclaiming Life’, hosted by the HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) theatre and performance center. She is currently working on her first monograph on the emergence of neoliberal gender/sexual politics in Iran.

Özgün Eylül İşcen is a media art theorist, lecturer, and curator based in Berlin and an affiliated fellow at the ICI Berlin. She holds a PhD in Computational Media, Arts, and Cultures from Duke University (2020). Her research focuses on the geopolitical aesthetic of computational media by delving into media histories and arts within the context of the Middle East. She is currently part of the research team Against Catastrophe led by Prof. Orit Halpern based at Technische Universität Dresden. She also co-edits web-based publishing Counter-N with Prof. Shintaro Miyazaki based at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her recent publications include: ‘The Racial Politics of Smart Urbanism: Dubai and Beirut as Two Sides of the Same Coin’, in Special Issue: The Politics of Race and Racialisation in the Middle East, ed. by Burcu Özçelik; Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44:12, 2282–2303, 2021; ‘Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism: The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital,’ in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger (ICI Berlin Press, 2022).

Kata Katz is a lecturer and PhD Candidate at the University of Arts Berlin, Germany. She studied philosophy, literature, and films studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary. Exploring how the photographic medium is used to construct different realities through its social and scientific uses, her research focuses on the connection between performativity and photography at the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, class and age. She has co-authored several essays that explore the benefits of failure in academia and beyond, as well as the future realities of science and research in the Danube region.

Bruna Martins Coelho is an associate researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch, having obtained her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Paris 8 in 2022, with the thesis titled ‘The Making of the Traditional Brazilian Family: An Obituary of the Brazilian Nation’ (with funding from Brazilian Ministry of Education/CAPES). In this genealogical study, she investigates the mutations of familial nationalism in Brazil, analyzing the interconnection between whiteness, rape, and the construction of the national political body. She is a member of the ‘Paradoxes of Emancipation: Knowledge and Democracy in the Post-Truth Era’ project (Centre Marc Bloch/Humboldt, University of São Paulo) and of the Nexos-Southeast research group (Cnpq/Brazil). She has taught as a lecturer at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) (2023) and at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès (2019). Her research, markedly transdisciplinary, is situated at the boundary between political philosophy, feminist and decolonial epistemologies, history, and French post-structuralism. She has also participated in the organization of activities to combat gender violence: the design of the cultural mediation project at the São Paulo Cultural Center signed by the GENERX collective (2015) and the Faire Face association workshops in Toulouse (2016-2017).

Marlon Miguel is the Co-Principal Investigator at the project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. He holds a double PhD in Fine Arts (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis) and Philosophy (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). His current research focuses on the intersection between contemporary philosophy, art, anthropology, and psychiatry. He also practices contemporary circus and does practical movement research. His recent publications include Camering: Fernand Deligny On Cinema and the Image (Leiden University Press, 2022); ‘Representing the World, Weathering Its End. Arthur Bispo do Rosário’s Ecology of the Ship’ in Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey Arnd Wedemeyer (ICI Berlin Press, 2020; republished in Afterall, 54, 2023); and ‘La clinique de Nise da Silveira au croisement de la psychanalyse, de la psychothérapie institutionnelle et des révolutions psychiatriques’ in Psychanalyse du reste du monde: Géo-histoire d’une subversion (La Découverte, 2023).

Frederico Santos dos Santos has a BA (2000) and MA (2005) in Social Sciences from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Federal University of São Carlos (2022). He is a professor at the Institute of Humanities, Sciences, Education and Creativity at the University of Passo Fundo (IHCEC/UPF), Brazil, where he acts as an advisor in the development of policies of affirmative action for black and indigenous people. He has carried out fieldwork and ethnographic research in Senegal and Brazil, addressing the transnational changes of Senegalese migrants between these two countries. He has published on ethnic and racial relations, migration, and their intersections with religion, nationality, class, and race.

Ana Carolina Schveitzer is currently a PhD student in African History at the Department for African Studies at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She studied at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil), where she earned an MA in History (2016) and a BA in History (2014). Her research highlights the connections between photography, work, and colonialism in Africa. She focuses on how German colonialism employed photography in Africa and how the circulation and production of photographs established broader links with the colonial system. Adopting a Visual History approach, her project aims to comprehend a colonial photographic standard related to the theme of work. The project is financially supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the German Historical Institut of London, and Stiftung Bildung und Wissenschaft.

Juliana M. Streva is a transdisciplinary researcher and filmmaker, with a background in law and critical legal studies. She currently works as a postdoctoral associate at the Institutes of Latin American Studies and Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin, as a member at the research consortium ‘Beyond Social Cohesion: Global Repertoires of Living Together’ (RePLITO), funded by Berlin University Alliance. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (Mecila), and a visiting fellow at the Universidade de São Paulo, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Brown University. She has authored a monograph titled Corpo, Raça, Poder: Extermínio Negro no Brasil (2018), which addresses the legal-political and onto-epistemological dimensions of the afterlives of slavery and anti-Black violence in Brazil. She directed and produced the films Mulheres em Movimento (2020) and Quilombo, Continuum (2023). Her work engages with critical black studies, anticolonial epistemologies, queer and feminist theories, with a particular focus on processes of abolition, unmastering, and worldmaking.

Nader Talebi is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin, working on migration and revolution in the Middle East with a specific focus on Iran. Since 2015, he has taught there and worked as a mixed-method researcher for several research projects at the Berlin Institute of Migration and Integration Research (BIM). His research interests comprise state theory, migration, revolution, nationalism, racism and politics of knowledge production on/in the Middle East. Born and raised in Iran, he studied software engineering at Iran University of Science and Technology and sociology at Allameh Tabatabai University before receiving his PhD in sociology from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. He is a former post-doctoral researcher at the University of Mannheim’s Center for European Social Research (MZES) and a co-founder and current project leader of MERGE, a research network at BIM bringing together critical scholars working on the Middle East.