Suweon Kim is an art-lover and animal-lover dreaming of becoming a green ranger after retirement. But for now, she is serving as an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of International Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies teaching development cooperation and public diplomacy in the context of South-South cooperation and decoloniality. She is the Principal Investigator of the project ‘Decolonising a Southern donor: AI curation and archiving in museum ODA,’ funded by National Research Foundation of Korea. The project explores the state identity of Korea as a Southern donor in the field of cultural and natural heritage and suggests decolonial way of doing a donor through Artificial Intelligence.
To activate the discussion on how to decolonise development cooperation, she is convening ‘Plural Developments: Human and Beyond-human’, an international research network examining development, biodiversity, and AI in light of decoloniality.

Jérémie Eyssette is a researcher working at the intersection of cultural policy, museum studies, and international development. Currently serving as an assistant professor in Global Business Communication at Chosun University in Gwangju, South Korea, his work focuses on heritage diplomacy, North-South and South–South cooperation, and the role of emerging technologies in reshaping cultural ecosystems.

His research explores how countries such as South Korea and China are redefining their position as “Southern donors” through cultural and technological initiatives, particularly in Africa. He is especially interested in the transformation of museums and heritage institutions into platforms for digital innovation, AI-driven curation, and collections-as-data approaches, as well as the ethical implications these shifts entail in light of decolonial theory.

Jérémie Eyssette is Co-Investigator of a National Research Foundation of Korea–funded project examining the coloniality of development assistance in the museum sector and the potential of artificial intelligence to foster more plural, participatory, and context-sensitive models of cooperation. His work engages with a wide range of case studies, from Sino-French museum partnerships to Korea–Africa heritage collaborations, with the aim of moving beyond state-centric and neo-colonial interpretations of museum diplomacy.

Gayoung Park is a Research Assistant Professor at the KAIST Global Center for Development and Strategy. Working at the intersection of engineering design and technology policy, she studies how AI-enabled public services can be translated from policy objectives into implementable system requirements, data architectures, interaction specifications, and human oversight mechanisms. Her research focuses on responsible AI implementation, human–AI interaction, and the design and evaluation of digital public systems.

Alf Gunvald Nilsen is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Asian Studies in Africa (CASA) at the University of Pretoria (UP). Before joining UP, he worked as an associate professor in the Department of Global Development and Planning at the University of Agder and as an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen. His work has explored how social movements organize and mobilize to contest dispossession and how indigenous communities engage in collective rights-based claimsmaking. In his current work, Prof Nilsen explores the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism in the global South in the early twenty-first century, in the context of growth, inequality, and protest from below.