In these proceedings, we highlight recent developments from both theory and experiment related to the global description of matter produced in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions as presented during the Quark Matter 2012 conference.
Strange quark and particle production is studied at the LHC with unprecedented high beam energies in both heavy-ion and proton-proton collisions: on the one hand, strangeness is used for investigating chemical equilibration and bulk properties; on th
e other hand, strange particles contribute to probe different kinematical domains, from the one where collective phenomena are at play up to the region dominated by pQCD-calculable processes. We highlight the suitability of the ALICE experiment for this topic, presenting our latest measurements and comparing them to models.
