Global Advisors

Professor Marisol de la Cadena

Professor Marisol de la Cadena (opens in a new window) is a Professor of Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies at the University of California, Davis. Located at the interface between STS and non-STS, and working through what she calls “ontological openings” (fellow traveler of but different from what has been termed “ontological turn”), Professor de la Cadena's interests include the study of politics, multispecies (or multi-entities), indigeneity, history and the a-historical, world anthropologies and the anthropologies of worlds. In all these areas her concern is the relationship between concepts and methods, and interfaces as analytical sites. More prosaically, Professor de la Cadena is interested in ethnographic concepts – those that blur the distinction between theory and the empirical because they are not without the latter. Professor de la Cadena's first book, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1910-1991, (2000) is an historical and ethnographic analysis of race relations in the Andes. Her recent book Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015) is based on conversations with two Quechua speaking men that lived in Cuzco (Peru).

Professor Dr. Orit Halpern

Orit Halpern is Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of automation, intelligence, and freedom;  the second project examines extreme infrastructures and the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering.

Her first book Beautiful Date: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and politics. Her most recent book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press 2023) is titled the Smartness Mandate. The book is a genealogy of our current obsession with smart  technologies and artificial intelligence.  She is also the director of the Digital Cultures Research Group and  co-director of The Schaufler Lab;  two groups bridging the arts, environmental sciences, media, and the social sciences in the interest of re-imagining technological futures.

Professor Joyce C.H. Liu

Joyce C.H. Liu (opens in a new window) is Chair Professor and director of the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies (SRCS_NCTU (opens in a new window)), the International Center for Cultural Studies (ICCS_NCTU (opens in a new window)), and the International Program of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies of the University System of Taiwan (IACS_UST (opens in a new window)). She was the founding director of the first Comparative Literature Program in Fu Jen Catholic University in 1994, the founding director of SRCS_NCTU in 2001, and ICCS_NCTU in 2013, and the president of the Cultural Studies Association in Taiwan ( 2002-2004). Her current research covers critical political theory and critical studies of Inter-Asian societies, including biopolitics, border politics, migration, unequal citizens, critical logistics, new colonialism, internal colonialism, and epistemic decolonial project.

Associate Professor Elisa Loncon Antileo

Elisa Loncon Antileo is an Associate Professor of Intercultural Education in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Santiago de Chile (USACH). She holds a Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Leiden and a Doctorate in Literature, from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. In 2021 she was elected to represent the Mapuche people in the Chilean Constitutional Convention and she served as the first President of the Convention. In 2021 TIME Magazine named Dr. Loncon among the world’s 100 Most Influential Women of 2021. Her current research covers bilingual intercultural education, the linguistic and philosophical study and interculturality.

Mimi Sheller, Ph.D.

Mimi Sheller, Ph.D., is Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts. Sheller is an interdisciplinary social scientist with work in Caribbean Studies, Mobilities Research, and Social Theory. Sheller was founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, and past President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. She has published more than 150 articles and chapters, and recent books include Advanced Introduction to Mobilities (Edward Elgar, 2021); Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2020); and Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (Verso, 2018).