CONTRIBUTORS
Academics, Activists, Artists

Sharad Chari is a geographer still puzzled by “geography” as earth–and ocean–writing. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and has held positions at the University of Michigan, the London School of Economics, and the University of the Witwatersrand. Ηe is currently a professor of Geography at Berkeley where he is also co-directs the Program in Critical Theory. His work spans agrarian Marxism, oceanic thought, and the afterlives of apartheid. From Fraternal Capital (2004), on the peasant foundations of industrial capitalism in India, to Gramsci at Sea (2023), which recasts Antonio Gramsci as an oceanic thinker, to Apartheid Remains (2024), on racial capitalism in Durban, he traces how histories sediment in space and struggle. Ongoing collaborations extend these inquiries across the Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.

Andreas Makris grew up in the mountain-wrapped city of Ioannina, which may explain his enduring fascination with ports. Trained initially as a civil engineer and later in logistics and supply chain management, he eventually defected to human geography and the social sciences. He recently completed his PhD at the University of St Andrews, developing a political geography and media theory of logistics centred on the port of Piraeus in Greece. During his doctoral research, he was awarded a Royal Society of Edinburgh Saltire Early Career Fellowship, which supported a placement at the University of Bologna focused on the digitalisation of the Piraeus container terminal. His work explores infrastructure, power, computation, labour, and energy at the intersection of the global and the planetary. He is currently based in Athens, where he works as a researcher and consultant.

Chloe Howe Haralambous is a scholar of Comparative Literature whose work examines mobility and revolution at sea, focusing on political, fictional, and criminological narratives of the Mediterranean crossing between Libya and Italy. Her first book, The Rescue Plot: Politics, Policing and Subterfuge in the Mediterranean Migrant Corridor, brings maritime fiction into dialogue with the embodied turbulence of the contemporary Mediterranean passage, drawing on her experience aboard activist rescue ships and aircraft operating along Europe’s maritime border. Challenging the view of borders as a battleground between Europe and its “outside,” she reads the Mediterranean as a stage on which Europe’s internal contradictions—financial crisis, liberal hegemony, radical politics, and migrant imaginaries—are negotiated. Her second project, Internationalisms (Un)Moored, traces the entanglements of irregular migration routes and maritime capital. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2024 and co-founded the Mosaik Support Center for Refugees on Lesvos.

José Nivoi is an Italian dockworker, trade unionist, and activist from the port city of Genoa. He is a longtime member and representative of the Collettivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali (CALP), an autonomous collective of port workers, and a representative of the militant grassroots union Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) at the Port of Genoa. Nivoi is widely known for organizing and participating in actions to block shipments of weapons and military equipment passing through Italian ports, opposing war and the global arms trade. In 2025 he took part in the Global Sumud Flotilla, a political mission attempting to reach Gaza with humanitarian aid while protesting the ongoing conflict; he was among the activists detained at sea by Israeli forces before later returning to Italy. His activism brings together labor organizing with anti-militarist and internationalist solidarity practices, including port blockades and large-scale food aid initiatives.

Tom Western is a writer, researcher, and artist, and Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at UCL. His work develops creative geographies that imagine futures beyond colonial pasts and presents. Based largely in Athens, he engages in collaborative research and movement-building practices that explore the relationship between political voice and urban space, and how migrant activism reshapes cities as sites of collective struggle. He is a member of the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum, where he directs the Citizens’ Sound Archive, a platform for civic engagement, youth activism, and collective knowledge production. He is currently completing his first book, Circular Movements, which traces Athens and the Mediterranean through loops and peripheries, mapping alternatives to linear imperial histories. He also produces spatial art-research projects, gathered under the platform Undercartographies.

Aspassia Kouzoupi is an architect and landscape designer with degrees from AUTH, ETH Zurich (MAS in Landscape Architecture), and the National School of Fine Arts, Athens. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Thessaly and was a postdoctoral fellow at NTUA (2019–2022) supported by the Greek State Scholarship Foundation. Her research explores diachronic mapping, infrastructural palimpsests, and Mediterranean socio-natural ecosystems in the context of the Anthropocene. A founding member of "Sculpted Architectural Landscapes: Golanda + Kouzoupi," her work—spanning teaching, research, and built projects—has been published internationally across architecture, landscape, and art platforms.

Penelope Papailias grew up in New York City and studied English literature at Harvard and cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan before reverse migrating as an adult to Greece, her father’s homeland. She is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the MA Program in Mobility Studies at the University of Thessaly. Her work explores the cultural politics of memory and public death, ethnographies of digital mediation and colonialism, decoloniality, and Black geographies in the Greek context, with recent projects focusing on genealogies of ecocide and environmental crisis. Committed to experimental pedagogy, she develops collaborative, site-responsive initiatives that mobilize social research as public intervention. She recently curated the exhibition-event Floodmarks at the Museum of the City of Volos following the devastating floods of September 2023. This year’s PSL will inform the Experiential and Diachronic Landscape Observatory she is developing with architect Aspassia Kouzoupi. Penelope is co-founder and director of the Pelion Summer Lab.

Ioulia Pentazou is a historian and Assistant Professor in the field of Humanities and Digital Media at the Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries at the University of Thessaly. Her teaching and research focus on memory and cultural heritage in the digital age, with particular emphasis on content design for cultural use, especially in archives and museums. Her work combines theoretical critique with applied research in digital culture. She has curated and implemented a number of projects for memory institutions (GLAM). Through her department’s Laboratory of Culture and Digital Media, she helps coordinate the Digital Museum of Neochori, an online platform of archival documents, press material, letters, photographs, and oral testimonies from local residents that functions simultaneously as archive and museum.

George Mantzios (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Mount Royal University (Canada), Associate Director of the Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities, and co-lead of the Ethnography Research and Practice Lab (Mount Royal University). He was previously the Mary Seeger O’Boyle Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University’s Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies. George holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto (2023), where his ethnographic research traced practices of historical redress in contemporary Athens— including archival activism, speculative fiction, and the defacement and reappropriation of national monuments and abandoned infrastructures. His scholarship engages debates on monumentality, ruination, political aesthetics, speculation, infrastructure, collective memory, and reparative justice. George has been involved with the Pelion Summer Lab since 2018, first as a participant on PSL Liminal Lives & Para-sites and since 2019 as part of the organizing team. His publications have appeared in Anthropology Quarterly, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, and the International Journal of Cultural Studies.

​Pantelis Probonas (he/him)  (@pprobonas) is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly. His doctoral thesis is a multi-sited ethnography about the politics of death and the disposal of refugees' dead bodies at the EU frontier. Theoretically, he is mostly interested in the body, politics of life and death, medical anthropology, borders and borderlands. He also works as a journalist and his articles and writing pieces have been published in several Greek media. He is one of the founding members of PSL and has been involved in desinging each year's concepts, coordinating and facilitating large part of PSL's activities.

Evangelia Apostolou [she/her] holds a degree in Architectural Engineering from the University of Thessaly [2005–2011], with a diploma thesis on 'Landscape Wanderings on the Western Coastline of Volos' and a research paper on 'The Holy Waters of Phthiotis.' She also graduated from the Department of Building Renovation and Restoration [Patras. 2001–2005]. Currently, she is pursuing an MA in Mobility Studies at the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology [IAKA] of the University of Thessaly. Since 2012, she has maintained her personal architectural studio in Volos, situated on the banks of the Krafsidonas torrent. With the dual flooding events of 2023 as a starting point, her research focuses on the body of Krafsidonas and, more broadly, the water body as a counter-archive to the official state archive. She is interested in 'co-moving' [syn-kinetika] bodies - both human and non-human - that, through their activation, produce new ways of becoming and new readings of architecture.

Iraklis Karagiannis studied Education and Social Anthropology, in which he holds a master’s degree. He worked for many years in public education and served as Director of the Experimental Primary School of Portaria. He is a co-founder of the Aristoteleio Center for Education, Culture and Science in Volos, where innovative science programs for school-age children are developed and implemented. Karagiannis has authored and published books of children’s literature as well as educational publications. He is also a founding member of the civic initiative Efhorion Zin, which focuses on the research, digitization, and preservation of private archives and oral histories, in collaboration with departments at the University of Thessaly. The group publishes the research and documentation journal Neochori of Pelion: Imprints of Life and History and organizes cultural events based on the archival materials and local narratives it collects.

Virginia Christou has been teaching Greek traditional dance in the region of Magnesia since 2011 and researching Greek dance practices since 2017. Her work focuses on communal dance rituals and antiphonal singing traditions performed without musical instruments. She is a founding member of the cultural and dance association Antamomata and organizes cultural events, seminars, and workshops that combine dance practice with research and community engagement.  Virginia holds a BA in Social Anthropology from the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly and an MA from the School of Physical Education and Sport Science in Sport Tourism, Event Organization, and Dance.

Konstantina Kontsa has a BA in archaeology and an MA in social anthropology. She is a museum professional who has worked as a curator and museum educator at the Folklore Historical Museum of Larissa and, since 2018, serves as Scientific Director of the Museum of Grain and Flour in Larissa. Her work focuses on research programs, exhibitions, and educational initiatives related to local history, material culture, and intangible heritage, with particular emphasis on oral history and inclusive museum practices. Since 2014 she has also worked as a licensed tour guide, organizing thematic walks and experiential tours in Larissa. Since 2025, she coordinates the Larissa Oral History Group.

Stathis Salamouras is a woodworker and artist based in Milina, South Pelion. Working from a distinctive studio housed inside a boat on land, he creates handmade wooden objects using driftwood collected from the sea. His practice transforms materials shaped by marine currents and coastal environments into sculptural and functional forms, drawing on the textures and histories embedded in the wood. Together with his partner Georgia Kolaxi, an artist and educator who works primarily with natural materials in local schools, he hosts workshops and creative sessions that invite participants to experiment with driftwood and explore the artistic potential of found coastal materials.