"Spotlight on…" Indi, Lukian and Ana

Spotlight on ... Indi-Carolina Kryg

My name is Indi-Carolina Kryg, and I am part of the GIGA Team since 2013. I worked in the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutsche Lateinamerikaforschung (ADLAF) Team for Prof. Detlef Nolte and a as student assistant in two research projects. Currently, I am the Personal Assistant to the GIGA President Prof. Amrita Narlikar, and I am happy to announce that I also joined the GIGA Doctoral Programme in October 2020.

I hold a master’s degree in Political Science with a specialization in comparative and regional studies from the University of Hamburg. For my master thesis, I stayed nine months in Mexico analyzing the political activism of Central American immigrants. In order to accomplish this goal, I volunteered at a migrant shelter in the South of Mexico, was a visiting scholar at CIESAS-Noreste in northern Mexico, and studied one semester at the BUAP University in Puebla (kind of the Center of Mexico).

The experiences during this year have shaped me personally and also enriched me as a scientist. This is the reason why I decided to continue working on topics like (forced) migration, border regimes, political agency, civil society organizations, and critical citizenship studies. Therefore, my PhD dissertation, under Prof. Merike Blofield’s supervision at the GIGA, links these topics focusing on Latin American refugees’ and immigrants’ political agency in Mexico. The aim is to understand and explain why and how they practice political agency and which role do Civil Society Organizations play here.

Besides my life as a PhD student, I am part of the ADLAF Junior Research Speakers Team, Amnesty International, and an intercultural youth association called IJEL e.V.

Spotlight on ... Lukian De Boni

My name is Luka De Boni and I joined the GIGA DP back in October. As a doctoral student affiliated with the University of Frankfurt through my supervisor Dr. Heike Holbig, my PhD will look at Chinese and Russian propaganda on human rights. On an academic level, I am interested in finding-out how the propaganda machines of these authoritarian states deal with the two-level playing field in which they act: the domestic and the international. Since human rights are a threatening concept for authoritarian regimes, Chinese and Russian propaganda seeks to limit their de-legitimating potential, in the face of a domestic and international audience. The interplay between internal and external propaganda, and therefore, internal and external legitimacy concerns, is what interests me. On a personal level, my interest for the topic comes partly from my deep affection for the two countries and their cultures, partly from my conviction that international human rights are a hallmark of human civilization, and partly from a slightly perverse interest in how information can be manipulated and crafted into convincing narratives.

Before I joined the GIGA, I studied History at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Growing-up in Russia, Luxembourg and Belgium in an Italian-Russian but French and English-speaking household, I have always been attracted to intercultural places of study. The GIGA fits the bill perfectly, and I am exited to come spend the next years of my life here in the beautiful city of Hamburg. In my life outside Academia, which does exist, I have a pretty standard set of hobbies: football, rugby, music, cinema and, more recently, chess.

Spotlight on ... Ana Soares

My name is Ana Soares, and I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Hamburg University. I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro and I finished my bachelor’s degree at La Salle University in 2015. In 2017, I got my master’s degree in International Relations at Corvinus University of Budapest.

In Brazil, I worked as an intern at the FGV in the Latin American Center for Public Policies (CLPP) and, in Hamburg, I worked at the Latin American department at Statista as a content researcher. At the moment, I am part of Prof. Dr. Antje Wiener’s chair of Global Governance at Hamburg University. I am also coordinating the working group “A Pandemic Peace? Narrative Shift in Discursive Disarmament Strategies” at the CSS Hamburg, and I have been acting as an associated graduate student to the IGK-SFB 138 “Dynamics of Security” at Marburg University since 2019. My areas of research include IR theory and security studies, with a focus on discourse analysis, collective actions, and securitization theory.

It was my passion in teaching and learning that drove me to follow an academic path. I am currently being funded by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung to develop my PhD dissertation called “Are (In)securitizing Narratives a Cause for Societal Mobilization? The Protests in Brazil and the Problem of the Audience” (with Prof. Wiener and Prof. Blofield as supervisors) which addresses the role of collective actions within the securitization framework. The choice to use Brazil as a case study is an obvious one, due to my nationality, interest in the dynamics of Brazilian politics and the events that happened between 2013 and 2016.