Supervisor's Main Webpage 

Academic Background

Prof. Dr. Sergio Costa started his academic career with economics at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, in Brazil, but switched to the sociology during his Master's degree, with a focus on social movements and democratization. Costa completed his PhD at Freie Universität in Berlin in 1995 and went on to also complete his postdoctoral dissertation there in 2005, entitled From the North Atlantic to the Black Atlantic: Social Theory, Anti-racism, Cosmopolitanism. Since then, his various research projects and leadership roles show a focus on local contexts such as Latin America - like the consortium  CarBioCial - Carbon sequestration, biodiversity and social structures in Southern Amazonia: models and implementation of carbon-optimized land management strategies, and Interdependente Ungleichheiten in Lateinamerika (Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America) - as well as broader understandings of inequality shown in his role as a spokesperson for the International Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Studies Conviviality in Unequal Societies.

Research Interests 

• social inequalities 
• cultural differences and democracy
• racism and anti-racism 

Select Research Projects

Since April 2017: Speaker of the International Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Studies Conviviality in Unequal Societies.

Since June 2011: Acquisition and institutional management of the subproject within the consortium CarBioCial - Carbon sequestration, biodiversity and social structures in Southern Amazonia: models and implementation of carbon-optimized land management strategies. 

2009-2014: Acquisition and institutional management of a sub-project within the framework of the joint project Fair Fuels? . 

2009-2011: coordination of a research project in cooperation with the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP, Brazil) and the Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social ( IDES , Argentina) on: Ethnic and Gender Reconfigurations of Law in Latin America. 

 Select Publications

• Jelin, Elizabeth, Renata Motta and Sérgio Costa. Global Entangled Inequalities. Conceptual Debates and Evidence from Latin America. 2017. London: Routledge. 
• Kron, Stefanie, Sérgio Costa and Marianne Braig (2012): Democracia y reconfiguraciones contemporáneas del derecho en América Latina. 2012. Frankfurt am Main, Madrid: Bibliotheca Ibero-Americana, 2012, Vervuert Verlag, p. 323.
• Rodríguez, Encarnación Gutiérrez, Manuela Boatca, and Sérgio Costa. Decolonizing European Sociology. Interdisciplinary Approaches. 2010. Surrey: Ashgate.