Program and Plenary Speakers

Keynote speakers:

• Godfrey Baldacchino BA PGCE MA PhD is professor of sociology at the University of Malta, in Malta. He has pioneered the academic study of islands and small jurisdictions. He is the founding Editor of Island Studies Journal (2006); former Canada Research Chair and UNESCO Co-Chair in Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada (2003-13; 2016-20); former President of ISISA, the International Small Islands Studies Association (2014-2022); founding Editor of Small States & Territories journal (2018) and Malta's former Ambassador-at-Large for Islands and Small States (2020-24). He has edited or authored over 50 books and monographs, as well as contributed to around 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. He is a pluri-disciplinarian, and most of his work lies at the intersection of politics and geography. He has promoted the specific study of archipelagos since 2010, and his books include Archipelago Tourism (2015) and Archipelago Tourism Revisited (2024), both with Routledge.

• Inocência Mata is an Essayist, researcher, and professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon in the area of Literature, Arts, and Cultures, and senior researcher at the Center for Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon, she has been a visiting professor at various institutions around the world, including the University of Macau, where she was deputy director of the Portuguese Department until 2017. She holds a PhD in Letters from the University of Lisbon and a postdoctorate in Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Studies, Identity, Ethnicity, and Globalization) from the University of California Berkeley. Mata is a member of the International Comparative Literature Association, the Association pour l'Étude des Literatures Africaines (France), the International Association of African Studies (AFROLIC, Brazil), the International Association of Social and Human Sciences in Portuguese Language (AILP-CSH), the Lisbon Academy of Sciences – Letters Class, the Angolan Academy of Letters, and the Galician Academy of the Portuguese Language, and is a founding member of UNEAS – National Union of Writers and Artists of São Tomé and Príncipe and honorary member of the Angolan Writers Union. He is also a member of the PowerList BANTUMEN 100 2025.

• ​​Roberto Gil Hernández has a PhD in Philosophy, Culture and Society from the University of La Laguna, where he teaches and researches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He is interested in fields such as Historical and Cultural Sociology, from which he studies the processes of political identity construction and their relationship with science, ideology, the Nation-state and cultural heritage. He is a member of the Inter-University Research Group The Tourist Experience: image, body and death in leisure culture (TURICOM), the Interdisciplinary Group for Social and Political Research at the University of La Laguna (GIISP in Spanish), the International Research Group Laboratoire d'Etudes Romanes (LER, EA 4385) at the Université Paris 8 (Saint-Denise, France), and the Centre for African Studies at the University of La Laguna (CEAULL in Spanish). He coordinates the Public Thought Programme of Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (TEA) Museum, entitled Not-All: criticism and negativity. He has recently published the books: Los fantasmas de los guanches (2019), En el Nombre de Canarias (2021), and Patrimonializar todo (2023).