Advisory Board

Since July 2025, Anja Grecko Lorenz has served as Executive Director of the German Centre for Research and Innovation São Paulo (DWIH São Paulo). In this role, she focuses on strengthening cooperation between Germany and Brazil in science, higher education and innovation, and on fostering dialogue on topics of mutual interest to both countries. Previously, she spent ten years at the Brazil Centre of the University of Münster, including six years as Executive Director in Münster and four years as Director of its Liaison Office in São Paulo. She has 20 years of experience in international cooperation in higher education, science, innovation and public policy in Europe and Latin America. Her professional background includes positions with international cooperation organisations and consulting firms in São Paulo, Brasília, Hamburg and Barcelona. She holds a degree in Economics and Latin American Studies from Freie Universität Berlin.

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Benjamin Junge is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at SUNY New Paltz. Employing interdisciplinary methods from anthropology, sociology, political science, and history, he contributes to discussions on class mobility, identity, and poverty reduction in Brazil and Latin America. His current project, “‘Family is Everything’: Generational Friction, Social Media, and Political Polarization at Election-Time in Recife, Brazil” explores family dynamics and class identities among Brazil’s once-rising poor, with a focus on social media’s role during political crises. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (USA) and the Fulbright Commission of Brazil. Dr. Junge is committed to interdisciplinary research and aims to contribute to global networks addressing social issues related to inequality and conviviality.

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez is a Professor in Sociology with a focus on Culture and Migration at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main. Previously to this position, she was Professor in General Sociology at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. She has published widely on gender, migration, and care work, and engages post Marxist and decolonial perspectives, feminist and queer epistemologies. She has been an early and staunch advocate of decolonial theory in the German-speaking world. Among her many publications is the book Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, published by Routledge (2010). More recently she has published with Shirley Anne Tate the Palgrave Handbook in Critical Race and Gender and with Rhoda Reddock Decolonial Perspectives on Entangled Inequalities: Europe and the Caribbean as well as with Pınar Tuzcu Migrantischer Feminismus in der deutschen Frauenbewegung. Her work engages with entangled migrations with a focus on German migration to Brazil, affective labor, materialities, institutional racism, racial capitalism and the coloniality of migration.

Gioconda Herrera holds a Ph.D in Sociology from Columbia University and is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales FLACSO in Quito/Ecuador since 1999. Over the past twenty years, she has studied the changing dynamics of South American Migration in the South-North Corridors to the USA and Europe. Her main publications address issues on social inequalities, international migration, gender and ethnicity; International Migration and Development and the State.  She is currently involved in two research projects: one is on indigenous migration and forced return in the era of deportation; the second is on immigration policies and social protection in South America. She has been Deputy Academic Director of FLACSO Ecuador (2014-2016), Chair of the Sociology and Gender Studies Department at FLACSO, and President of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in 2020/2021.

Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha is a Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. She was a Post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University (1999-2000), John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (2002), Visiting-Professor at New York University (2006-2007), and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam (2017), and Tinker Professor at the University of Chicago (2018). She is currently a Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) Researcher and the Rio de Janeiro Research Foundation (FAPERJ) Fellow. Her research interests include creativity, plantation, and plantationocene in effects in the Caribbean, with the main focus on the Maroon and traditional populations cosmopolitics in South America and the Caribbean.