Keynote Speakers
Amina Abubakar Ali
Aga Khan University, Kenya
Amina Abubakar Ali is known for her research on neurocognitive and mental health outcomes of children and adolescents exposed to multiple risk factors. in 2016, she was awarded the Royal Society Pfizer Award for her innovative work on the development of early childhood development measures and her substantial contributions to the field of neurological assessment. She is a visiting academic at the University of Oxford and a senior research scientist at the Kenya Medical Institute.
Tina Malti
University of Toronto, Canada and Universität Leipzig, Germany
Tina Malti’s research interests revolve around the socioemotional development and mental health of children, with a focus on developing measures and interventions to help children overcome the effects of trauma and violence. She is the founding director of the Laboratory for Social-Emotional Development and Intervention and of the Centre for Child Development, Mental Health, and Policy in the University of Toronto. In 2023, she was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, and is now the director of the Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development (LFE) in Leipzig University.
Josefina Bañales
University of Illinois, Chicago, USA
The main research interests of Josefina Bañales are critical racial consciousness, sociopolitical development, racial identity, and youth participatory action research. She is the lab director of the CAMBIAR (Challenging Oppressive Actions and Structures Towards Marginalized Communities in Academia and Research) Collective, a research team examining how social contexts and individual sociocultural factors contribute to critical consciousness development. Working together with youth, parents, and other organizations, she also co-creates opportunities for youth to develop critical racial consciousness. She is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois.
Sunil Bhatia
Connecticut College, USA
Sunil Bhatia is a Professor at Connecticut College and specializes in racial, ethnic, and migrant identity in global and transnational cultures, cultural psychology and narrative theory, and ethnographic and qualitative methods. He has written extensively on the topics of migration, identity, and cultural psychology. In 2018, he published the book Decolonizing Psychology: Globalization, Social Justice and Indian Youth Identities, for which he received the William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association. In 2006, he started his own non-profit organization, and continues to collaborate with community partners and non-profit organizations in the United States and India.
Noa K. Ha
German Center for Integration and Migration Research, DeZIM, Germany
Noa K. Ha is a postcolonial urban researcher and the scientific director of the German Center for Integration and Migration Research. Her work focuses on migration and social change, urban remembrance practice, and critical race, intersectional, feminist, and decolonial theory. She has published widely in journals, anthologies, and catalogues, with her most recent works, European Cities: Modernity, race, and colonialism and Städtische Episteme dekolonisieren: Europa und die Europäische Stadt nach 1989 als koloniale Ordnung (Decolonizing Urban Epistemes: Europe and the European City after 1989 as a Colonial Order), published in 2022 and 2023, respectively.