Keynote Speakers
Sergio Costa
Trained in economics and sociology in Brazil and Germany, Sérgio Costa has been since 2008 a Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Latin American Studies (LAI) and Institute of Sociology (IfS) at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is the project leader and current director of the BMFTR Maria Sybilla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (Mecila) as well as a Principal Investigator at the DFG International Research Training Group Temporalities of Future and at the DFG Research Unit Collaborations: Assemblages, Articulations, Alliances. His main areas of research are: contemporary social theory, social inequalities, racism and antiracism, living together in difference. His most recent monographs are: Desiguais e Divididos (Todavia, 2025); A Port in Global Capitalism (Routledge 2020, co/authored with Guilherme Leite Gonçalves); Entre el Atlántico y el Pacífico Negro (Iberoamericana 2019, co-authored with Manuel Góngora-Mera y Rocío Vera-Santos and winner of the LASA Iberoamericano Book Award 2020)
Svenja Taubner
Clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst and serves as full professor and director at the Institute for Psychosocial Prevention and Psychotherapy at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Among her many interests is clinical applications, development and research on mentalization based treatments, transgenerational transmission of trauma and the psychological understanding and treatment of aggression. Currently, she is deputy spokesperson of the inerdisciplinary DFG-research training program on ”Ambivalent Enmity”.
Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser
Professor at the Institute of Political Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and director of the Laboratory for the Study of the Far Right (ultra-lab). He obtained his PhD in Political Science from Humboldt University in Berlin and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB). He has been a professor at Diego Portales University in Santiago, Chile, and a Marie Curie researcher at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. In recent years, he has been a visiting professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS) in Italy, Uppsala University in Sweden, and Sciences Po in France. His area of research is comparative politics, with a particular emphasis on how extremist and populist forces affect the functioning of democracy in both Latin America and Europe. Among other publications, he is the author of “The Resilience of the Latin American Right” (Johns Hopkins University Press), “Populism: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford University Press), “The Oxford Handbook of Populism” (Oxford University Press), and “Riding the Populist Wave: Europe’s Mainstream Right in Crisis” (Cambridge University Press).
