Catalina is an anthropologist doing marine social science research in the Caribbean for over two decades. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in the Geography and International Development Department at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her research, situated in critical ocean studies, focuses on ocean justice and marine governance in contested marine areas. In particular, she works with the Black-Creole communities in the islands located on the Nicaraguan-Colombian contested border area, exploring the Indigenous marine laws and their forms of resisting international sea regimes regarding artisanal fisheries, sea mobility, and marine environmental resource management. In addition to her ongoing PhD research, Catalina is a consultant and independent researcher at the NGO Erigaie.

Javier Corrales is Dwight W. Morrow 1895 professor and chair of Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He obtained his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1996. Corrales's research focuses on democratization, presidential powers, democratic backsliding, political economy of development, ruling parties, the incumbent's advantage, foreign policies, and sexuality. He has published extensively on Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to ogoing research on Venezuela's politics, Corrales is also working on three separate projects: 

1) Incumbents, Expresidents, and Newcomers;

2) variations in the performance of national oil companies, and
3) the factors helping to expand LGBT rights in Latin America.

Irene Arends is a cultural anthropologist with a focus on youth cultures, gender, sexuality, motherhoods and feminist ethnography. She has a bachelor's degree in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology from the Radboud University (2007); a master’s degree in International Development Studies from the UvA (2012, cum laude); and obtained her PhD at the Centre for Latin American Studies, UvA (2022). She was the academic director of the LOVA International Summer/Winter Schools between 2018-2022. Irene’s current research interest lie at the intersection of feminism and animal advocacy.