Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky has been Professor of Sociology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) of Munich since 2008. Her work focuses on gender studies, sociological theories, sociology of the body, cultural studies and socialisation and subject concepts. She was Assistant Professor at the Institute for Sociology and Social Psychology at Leibniz-Universität Hannover and guest lecturer, amongst others, at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck. From 2010 to 2012 she was Executive Director of the Institute for Sociology of the LMU Munich, from 2011 to 2013 elected member of the Council of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) and since April 2013 elected member of this same institution.

Nilma Lino Gomes is Professor of Pedagogy at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. She was the Rector of the Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira (UNILAB) (2013-2014), the Minister of the Special Secretariat of Policies to Promote Racial Equality (2015) and also the Minister of Women, Racial Equality, Youth and Human Rights (2015-2016) in Brazil. Her main areas of research are: ethnic-racial relations and education, teachers training for ethnic-racial diversity, public policies on education, social and racial inequalities, social movements and education with an emphasis on the Brazilian black movement.

Thomas Duve has been Professor for Comparative Legal History at the Faculty of Law of the Goethe University Frankfurt since 2009 and the Director at the Max-Planck Institute for European Legal History since 2010. He mainly works on the legal history of the imperial spaces of the Iberian monarchies in the early modern period and on global historical perspectives on European legal history. From 2005 to 2009, he was Professor of Legal History at the Pontifícia Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA) as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho, Buenos Aires.

Arjun Appadurai is the Paulette Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. Since 2019, he has also been Professor of Anthropology and Globalisation at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. He also serves as Honorary Professor in the Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Tata Chair Professor at The Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai and as a Senior Research Partner at the Max-Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Prof. Appadurai is also the founder and the current President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India).

Jeffrey Lesser is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and the Director of the Halle Institute for Global Research and Learning at Emory University. His field of research comprises Modern Latin American History, focusing on ethnicity, immigration and race, especially in Brazil, with a special interest in the construction of national identity. He has worked several times as a distinguished Visiting Professor in Brazil – mainly at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) –, and in other North American institutions such as the Connecticut College and Brown University as well as at Tel Aviv University, Israel.