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Who are we?

Researcher Dr Araya López
Photo: Jonathan Araya

The researcher

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow for the PROTEST-AIRT project is Dr Alexander Araya López, a sociologist who obtained his Ph.D. at the Lateinamerika-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin in 2014. His doctoral thesis focused on media discourses about graffiti practices in Brazil and Costa Rica. In 2018, Dr Araya López was awarded his first Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship for the project RIGHTS UP, which was hosted at Ca' Foscari, University of Venice. The RIGHTS UP project explored the emergence of social movements critical of mass tourism in three European cities, namely Venice, Amsterdam and Barcelona. Dr Araya López has also worked as an invited postdoctoral researcher at La Sorbonne Paris 3, Institut des Hautes Etudes de l'Amérique Latine (IHEAL), where he studied the media discourses about the opposition against Daniel Ortega's government in Nicaragua. He concluded both his Bachelor and Licentiate degrees at the Universidad de Costa Rica, where he taught Sociology of Media and Communication.

He has extensive expertise on social movements, urban dissent and cross-comparative analysis both within Europe and in Latin America. His research interests include contemporary discussions on protest, radical politics, civil/democratic disobedience and media representations of acts of dissent.

Researcher Dr Araya López
Photo: Jonathan Araya

The supervisors

The supervisor at Universität Potsdam is Dr Jürgen Mackert, a professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, where he teaches various courses such as Sociology of Violence, Sociology of Inequality, Political Economy and Qualitative Methods for Social Sciences since 2009. Dr Mackert concluded his PhD Studies at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin in 1998, obtaining his Habilitation in 2005. His research interests include political sociology, migration studies, closure theory, sociology of citizenship and settler colonial studies. He recently published a three-volume collection of studies on The Condition of Democracy (2021), an editorial work in collaboration with Hannah Wolf and Dr Bryan S. Turner, which explores a diversity of subjects such as neoliberal politics, post coloniality and contesting citizenship. His outstanding research track includes critical work on populism, order, and violence, which fits the main theoretical goal of the PROTEST-AIRT project given its relation to issues of ‘radical’ politics or the media representation of acts of civil/democratic disobedience. Dr Mackert is Co-Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Diversity, which was founded in 2016 and promotes critical and sociological interdisciplinary debate on major economic, political, social and cultural problems and challenges. His key publications related to the PROTEST-AIRT project are: “Social Life as Collective Struggle: Closure Theory and the Problem of Solidarity” (2021); “Urban warfare. Neo-liberalism’s assault on democratic life in the city” (with Wolf, 2020) and “Citizenship and Political Struggle” (with Dr Turner, 2017).

The supervisor for the secondment at the Universiteit van Amsterdam is Dr Marlies Glasius, who specializes in transnational politics, international relations, transitional justice, social theory, and qualitative methods. She obtained her PhD at the University of Utrecht in 1999 and has been Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics, UvA since 2013. Dr Glasius will contribute to the PROTEST-AIRT project with her expertise on global politics and the global civil society. Her most recent research centers on the study of authoritarianism in the global age.