Left-behindness contested:

Olga Jubany is Full Professor, Director of the European Social Research Unit, and coordinator of the Gender, Identity and Diversity Research Group at the Universitat de Barcelona. She is Editor, together with Prof. Saskia Sassen, of the Palgrave Macmillan Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship Series. She has authored numerous publications on identity, social control, racism, gender and migration, adopting an ethnographic and intersectional approach.

Akhil Gupta is a sociocultural anthropologist and Professor at the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Gupta's work focuses on questions of transnational capitalism, infrastructure, and corruption. His research has led him from studying agriculture to state development agencies to multinational corporations. He is interested in themes of contemporary capitalism, development, postcoloniality, globalization, and the state. His empirical research interrogates anthropological and social theory from its margins by attending to the experiences of peasants and other marginalized groups. Combining cultural and sociological analyses of institutions and social life with questions raised by postcolonial theory, he uses rigorous and intensive ethnographic research to rethink major questions in social theory dealing with space, place, and temporality.

Daniele Karasz holds a PhD in Anthropology. He is researcher at the Research Unit Sociology of the TU Vienna and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna. He works on topics related to migration, housing as well as urban and regional development. The collaboration between Anthropology and planning-oriented disciplines has been a particular interest in his work for many years. Current thematic areas of research include unequal territorial development, political (non)participation and the ongoing dissolution of the boundaries between labour and dwelling. He has coordinated numerous research projects and participated in the planning and realization of subsidized housing in Vienna.

Camila del Mármol is Associate Professor and currently the Head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona. She has pursued ethnographic research in the Catalan Pyrenees focusing on the development of heritage processes in its intersection with changing ruralities. Her areas of interest and publications include the transformation of rural areas, bringing together the analysis of macroeconomic change and its impact on social identities and moralities, structures of feeling and local uses of the past. She has also conducted research on intangible heritage and food heritage in Catalonia and Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Andes, on agroecological networks in indigenous contexts. Her main research continues to focus on the Pyrenees analyzing the expansion of critical metal mining in the EU and its confrontation with previous frameworks emphasizing conservation policies and tourism for rural areas; as well as the novel dynamics in rural regions revolving around social movements, the social and solidarity economy and the new commons.

Ana Viñuela, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Applied Economics and member of the research group REGIOlab (https://regiolab.es/).

Giorgio Pirina is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna. His research focuses on the sociology of work, with particular attention to the transformations of labour under platform capitalism and the socio-ecological impacts of digital technologies.

Paolo Postiglione is Professor of Economic Statistics at “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti–Pescara. His research focuses on regional quantitative analysis, spatial statistics and econometrics, regional inequality and convergence, spatial composite indicators, and socio-economic well-being. He is Principal Investigator of the SCI-WEB project and previously led the University of Chieti–Pescara team in the Horizon 2020 IMAJINE project on spatial justice and territorial inequalities. A member of the EU-REAL research network, he is the author of books published by Springer and CRC Press, as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Dr Isabelle Carles is a lawyer and sociologist specialising in gender, migration, integration and anti-discrimination issues. She is a researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. Her research interests include analysing asylum and migration issues from a gender perspective, multiple discrimination, and legal socialisation. Her recent research has focused on analysing territorial inequalities from an intersectional perspective. Over the past twenty years, she has participated in numerous European projects and acted as a consultant for the European Union, the United Nations, European trade unions, the European Social Fund, and various national NGOs dedicated to diversity issues.

Ajmal Hussain has research interests in urban and cultural sociology. He works on issues of new modalities of political expression among marginalised constituencies in postcolonial societies of Europe and in the Muslim world, the production of urban space through collaborations across different constituencies of power, and the role of affect in shaping political subjectivity. He is currently associate professor in the faculty of social sciences at Warwick University.

Anja Jørgensen, Ph.D., is a Professor of Urban Sociology and Head of SocMap (www.socmap.aau.dk). She has extensive experience in leading and conducting research projects across urban and rural sociology, with a focus on key issues such as territorial inequality, urbanization, territorial cohesion, neighborhood communities, place-based belonging, and vulnerable neighborhoods. Jørgensen has successfully led both large international collaborative projects and mid-sized, Scandinavian and nationally oriented research initiatives. For years, she has been deeply involved in developing a territorial dimension within the European Social Model, particularly in relation to economic growth, Inclusiveness and democratic capacity. She is one of the central figures (together with Rolf Lyneborg Lund) in developing a micro-area mapping tool based on flexible boundaries, sociological variables and algorithmic learning. This is a unique tool to integrate in-depth understanding of territorial variations and territorial inequality to identify geosocial diversity and local uniqueness into sociological analysis.

Žarko Šunderić is the director of the Center for Social Policy, a Belgrade-based think tank focused on promoting inclusive growth, fostering social cohesion, and advancing a more effective welfare state. He is also a co-founder and member of the Western Balkans Network: The Future of the Welfare State, which gathers leading think-tank organizations and researchers across the region to address welfare policy challenges. From 2008 to 2015, Žarko led the Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction Unit within the Government of Serbia, coordinating efforts in social inclusion and poverty reduction. He has extensive experience in adapting European social inclusion policies and introducing central government functions, including strategic planning, policy coordination, and analysis in Serbia and the Western Balkans. He has worked on numerous EU-funded projects through programs such as EaSI, IPA, and Horizon, focusing on social innovation, reducing inequality, promoting active inclusion, and advancing social inclusion.

Emmanuèle Cunningham Sabot is Professor of Geography at the Ecole normale supérieure de Paris. She specialises on the topic of shrinking cities. Her wider research topics include territories and cities in decline, urban governance, and local development. She has authored and edited numerous publications, including the Handbook on Shrinking Cities (2022).

Sara Pilìa is coordinator of the working group on 'Inner Areas' of the ARCI Commission on Cultural activities. She has been working on the topic of social innovation in Italian 'Inner Areas' since 2017. An advocate since young age, after her PhD in Political and Social Institutions of Contemporary China, decided to move to the countryside and use her research training in advocacy work. Since 2019 she has cooperated with ARCI as a Project Manager focusing on projects that use social and cultural activities to support communities living in inner areas to find practical solutions to everyday and long-term challenges, and to strengthen their advocacy ability. She is particularly interested in activities that facilitate the dissemination of academic and research knowledge as a tool of awareness raising and empowerment for local communities, and informal education for children and young people. She also works as a Policy Analyst for Eurodoc – The European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Resarchers, and represents Stakeholders Group 4 - Individual researchers in the ERA Forum Action 5 subgroup.

Marta Aboud Bellas is a resident of the San Isidro neighbourhood in Madrid. She is a member of the Board of her local neighbourhood association, where she has been actively involved since moving to the area in 2019. Strongly convinced of the power of grassroots neighbourhood movements and collective action, she dedicates her free time to working for a better neighbourhood through community activism and political advocacy, aiming to improve infrastructure, public services and the social fabric. She envisions a neighbourhood that is dignified for its residents, on an equal footing with the rest of the city. Previously, she has also been involved in other social, feminist and political movements.Trained as a political scientist, specialising in international relations, she has worked in international cooperation in several countries, including Syria, Jordan and Ethiopia. She has coordinated social intervention projects and worked for one legislative term at the European Parliament as an advisor. She is currently a civil servant, managing a public policy at the Spanish Ministry of Equality.

Erasmo Palazzotto is a human rights expert with over eighteen years of experience in international cooperation, sustainability and civil society. He served as a Member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies in the seventeenth and eighteenth legislatures, as Vice Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and Chair of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the murder of Giulio Regeni. In 2017 he represented the Italian Parliament at the United Nations General Assembly. He is a co-promoter and former Head of Mission of Mediterranea Saving Humans, a humanitarian NGO active in search and rescue operations in the Central Mediterranean. He has coordinated international cooperation projects in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, working with networks of NGOs and social movements. He currently works for ARCI, where he coordinates projects on the protection of civic space and democracy and leads the TOM project, a civil society initiative focused on observation, solidarity and humanitarian action in the Mediterranean. He is also a member of the Board of the European Civic Forum.

Paul Himmelbauer is coordinator for Spatial Development at the Austrian Conference on Spatial Planning (ÖROK), a joint body of the federal government, the federal states, and municipalities that coordinates spatial planning and regional development in Austria. Trained as a landscape planner, he previously worked as a research associate at the Institute of Spatial Planning, Environmental Planning and Land Policy at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU).

Nancy Zoidou Saripapa is a dedicated project manager and researcher at KMOP - Social Action and Innovation Centre, where she leads the research on social inclusion within European projects, particularly those tackling inequalities and underprivileged regions. As the main researcher for the Horizon-funded EXIT and REVERS-ED projects, Nancy brings significant expertise in examining territorial and educational inequalities through an intersectional lens. Her work directly addresses how educational systems can unlock potential in marginalized regions, providing policy recommendations that aim to reduce social exclusion. With a strong academic background in European political studies and human rights, her insights are crucial to understanding how educational reforms can drive social innovation and inclusion within left-behind territories.

Martina Klett-Davies, PhD in Sociology, is a Lecturer at King’s College London and Module Leader for the Social Science course at King’s Foundations. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, serves as an external examiner at Aston University, and acts as Ethics Advisor for two large-scale Horizon Europe–funded research projects. Her research is applied, mixed-methods, international, and collaborative, focusing on gender, sexuality, and social justice in relation to the state, law, stakeholders, publics, and family and personal lives.