A "New Silk Road of Culture"?

Ximena Zapata is a researcher in the fields of global political economy and international relations with a focus on Latin America. She is a PhD researcher in Political Science at the University of Hamburg and the GIGA Institute, Germany. She holds a master’s degree in International Relations from FLACSO-Ecuador. Her research interests include cultural diplomacy, political economy of development, regionalism, and China’s engagement in Latin America.  

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Development economist Avril Joffe heads the Cultural Policy and Management Department at the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand. Her areas of focus are cultural policy design, implementation and evaluation and mapping and assessment of the cultural economy. Avril has developed cultural policy frameworks and training programmes for arts management and cultural entrepreneurship. As a policy analyst and consultant, she has worked for international and national organisations and governments across Africa.

List of publications:

• How governments could better engage with the working practices of the 21st century creative economy. In: Creative economy 2030. Imagining and delivering a robust, inclusive and sustainable recovery. Asian Development Bank, 2022
• Not a toolkit! Fair collaboration in cultural relations: a reflAction. EUNIC, 2022
• Investigating Infrastructures of Urban Inequality. In: Inequality Studies from the Global South. Routledge, London, 2020
• Pedagogy as activist practice: A reflection on the Cultural Policy and Management degree in South Africa. In: Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 2019/05

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Prof Dr Hanns W Maull is a researcher at „Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik“ (SWP) and adjunct professor of International Relations at the Bologna Center of Johns Hopkins University. Between 2004 and 2012, Hans Maull was chairman of the research advisory board and member of the board of trustees of SWP Berlin. His current research interests include the development and future perspectives of the international order, as well as German and Japanese foreign policy.

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Dr Lutz Möller is Deputy Secretary-General of the German Commission for UNESCO, the central interface between UNESCO, the German government and German civil society and academia, based in Bonn. He works for the Commission since 2004 and since 2015 in his current post, with additional specific responsibility for the policy division 'Education, Science, Culture'.

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Prof Dr Bert Hoffmann is a political scientist, honorary professor at „Freie Universität Berlin“ and has been head of the “German Institute for Global and Area Studies” (GIGA) in Berlin since 2015. In August this year, he also took over the co-direction of the GIGA Institute for Latin American Studies and is primarily concerned with political, economic and social developments in this region, such as Cuba's transformation or transnational migration and diaspora politics. Bert Hoffmann is also member of the Executive Board of the research network desiguALdades.net, an interdisciplinary research network on interdependent inequalities in Latin America.

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