Keynote Speakers

Gianpaolo Baiocchi is a sociologist and an ethnographer interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, and cities. He has written about and continues to research instances of actually existing civic life and participatory democracy. His most recent work is Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation (Stanford University Press, 2016), which he co-authored with Ernesto Ganuza. The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life (co-authored with Elizabeth Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Stephanie Savell, and Peter Klein; Paradigm Publishers, 2014) examines the contours and limits of the democratic conversation in the US today. He is also the author, along with Patrick Heller and Marcelo K. Silva, of Bootstrapping Democracy: Experiments in Urban Governance in Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Militants and Citizens: Local Democracy on a Global Stage in Porto Alegre (Stanford University Press, 2005). He is the editor of Radicals in Power: Experiments in Urban Democracy in Brazil (Zed Press, 2003). An engaged scholar, Baiocchi was one of the founders of the Participatory Budgeting Project and continues to work with groups improving urban democracy. He heads Gallatin’s Urban Democracy Lab, which launched in 2014 and which provides a space for scholars and practitioners to collaborate and exchange ideas for cultivating just, sustainable, and creative urban futures.

Laura Centemeri is Researcher in environmental sociology at the French CNRS. She works at the Centre d’Étude des Mouvements Sociaux (CEMS) of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS Paris). She applies the perspective of the sociology of critical capacities to the understanding of environmentalism. She has done research on post-disaster mobilizations and environmental conflicts, and she is currently doing research on the transnational movement of permaculture. Among her recent publications: La permaculture ou l’art de réhabiter  (2019, Ed. QUAE) and ‘Commons and the new environmentalism of everyday life. Alternative value practices and multispecies commoning in the permaculture movement’. Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, 2018, 64(2), 289-313.

Suvi Salmenniemi is professor of sociology at the University of Turku, Finland. Her areas of expertise include political sociology, cultural studies, therapeutic culture, feminist research and critical social theory. Her current research explores the politics of self-help, new spiritualities and complementary and alternative medicine.  She is the editor of Assembling Therapeutics: Cultures, Politics and Materiality (Routledge, 2019) and the author of Democratization and Gender in Contemporary Russia (Routledge, 2008). Her articles have appeared in The Sociological Review, Sociology, Social Movement Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies and The British Journal of Sociology.

Dr Shakuntala Banaji is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where she also serves as Director of Graduate Studies and Programme Director for the MSc Media, Communication and Development. She lectures on International Media and the Global South, Film theory and World Cinema, and Critical Approaches to Media, Communication and Development in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. She has published extensively on young people, children and media as well as gender, ethnicity and new media and cinema, with articles on Hindi horror films, social media use in the Middle East and North Africa and children, social class and media in India recently published; and chapters on orientalism and racism in Media, and child stars in Hindi cinema available. She has also published on misinformation and fake news, creativity, democracy, the internet and civic participation.

Mark Haugaard is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. He is the founder editor of the Journal of Political Power, published by Routledge, and the book series, Social and Political Power, with Manchester University Press. He has published extensively upon power, and his most recent publication is The Four Dimensions of Power: understanding domination, empowerment and democracy, 2020 (July), Manchester University Press.

Mike Zapp is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Social Science, Université du Luxembourg (UL). Before joining UL, he worked as a fellow at Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University and held a prior post-doc position at UL within the project The New Governance of Educational Research. His research is interested in institutional change in (global) higher education and science, international organizations and global governance and has appeared in journals like Sociology of Education, International Sociology and International Journal of Educational Development