Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Dinha
Shahd Wadi
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Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology, University of Coimbra (Portugal), and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned an LL.M and J.S.D. from Yale University and holds the Degree of Doctor of Laws, Honoris Causa, by McGill University. He is Director Emeritus of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and has written and published widely on the issues of globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, social movements and the World Social Forum in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, Chinese, Danish, Romanian and Polish.
His most recent project ALICE: Leading Europe to a New Way of Sharing the World Experiences was funded by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council, one of the most prestigious and highly competitive international financial institutes for scientific excellence in Europe.
His most recent books in English are: The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham and London: Duke University Press (2018); Decolonising the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. Boaventura de Sousa Santos also writes lyrics for rap, as shown in his book Rap Global (Rio de Janeiro, Aeroplano, 2010; Confraria do Vento, 2019).
Dinha - Maria Nilda de Carvalho Mota is a poet, independent editor, master and doctor in Comparative Studies of Portuguese Language and Literatures from the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo. She is also a Postdoctoral Fellow in Literature and Society at the Institute of Brazilian Studies (IEB) of the University of São Paulo, where she develops a research in literature and dehumanization in Female Prisons. Dinha is also a teacher, a militant against the genocide of the black and poor population, and forms part of the groups Posse Poder e Revolução (group of political and cultural activities in the periphery of São Paulo) and Edições Me Parió Revolução (group of black women provided by the publication of the main books such as Onde Estaes Felicidade? in honor of the centenary of Carolina Maria de Jesus's birth, the “Black Cinderella”).
Shahd Wadi is Palestinian among other possibilities, but the freedom is mostly Palestinian. She sought her resistance through her PhD thesis in Feminist Studies at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, which was published in a book entitled “Bodies in a Bundle: Artistic-Life-Stories of Palestinian Women in Exile” (2017). She was also nominated by The European Project for Research Dissemination (ERD), to be part of the platform of Best European Young Researcher. She holds Master’s degree in the same field with a thesis entitled "Feminisms of Occupied Bodies: Palestinian Women between Two Resistances" (2011) She was the first in Portugal to receive each of these degrees in this field. In her research she addresses the narratives and representations of women’s bodies in cultural and artistic contemporary creations as simultaneously silence and site of resistance in the context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. She considers art a life testimony, also her own.