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.

Mario Alberto Araya Pérez is a Costa Rican social anthropologist and a visiting researcher at CEDLA. He is affiliated with the Youth Agenda in Rights and Citizenship Centre at the National Distance Education University of Costa Rica (UNED) and is a PhD candidate in the Central American Social Sciences Doctoral Programme at the University of Costa Rica.

​

Mario's doctoral research focuses on the logics and dynamics of confinement in urban-marginalised communities in El Salvador and Costa Rica. During his doctoral internship at CEDLA, he is systematising and analysing fieldwork data collected between January 2023 and June 2024. He is also beginning the initial stages of writing his thesis, under the supervision of Dr Julienne Weegels.