Philippe Bourgois is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Social Medicine at the Semel Institute for Neuropsychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, Los Angeles. His publications address urban poverty, segregation, violence, drugs and labor migration. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Central America (Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and El Salvador) and the inner-city United States (New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles). He has published over a dozen books, edited volumes, special issues of journals and approximately 150 articles but his two best-known books are In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge, 1995) and Righteous Dopefiend (co-authored with Jeff Schonberg, University of California, 2009). Other volumes include, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Johns Hopkins, 1989), Violence in War and Peace (Co-edited with Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Blackwell 2004), and Violence at the Urban Margins (Co-edited with Javier Auyero and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Oxford 2015). Between 1996 and 2017 he was the Principal Investigator on a continuous National Institutes of Health grant examining the HIV risk environment of indigent drug users. He recently completed five years of participant-observation fieldwork in a violently-policed Puerto Rican neighborhood dominated by open-air narcotics supermarkets in North Philadelphia and is currently co-authoring (with Laurie Hart, George Karandinos and Fernando Montero) a book on the carceral and psychiatric management of inner city poverty entitled "Cornered". http://www.philippebourgois.net
Claire Bullen is a post-doctoral researcher, currently based at the Institute of Mediterranean, European and Comparative Ethnography (IDEMEC, UMR 7307) at the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de L’Homme at Aix-Marseille University (France). Following her doctoral research at the University of Manchester, where she examined the intersection of cultural policies and social relations in Liverpool (UK) and Marseilles (France), she has just begun a new project examining the politics and practices of heritage-making in impoverished ‘historic’ parts of Oran (Algeria). Eventually, this fieldwork will be analysed alongside material gathered in Marseilles, in order to explore divergences and convergences in the dynamics of heritage work and urban transformation across the Mediterranean Sea. Her research interests include transforming socio-spatial relations in cities, transnational links, the intersection between history and anthropology, and ethnographic comparison.
Mehrnoosh Farzamfar is a researcher at the Faculty of Law at the University of Helsinki. As a doctoral candidate in law, she focuses on the security aspects of migration and population movement, especially in the times of crisis. In her current research, she applies a multi-disciplinary approach between law, political science and legal anthropology in response to the security concerns of States in contrast to protecting the human rights of immigrants.
Mehrnoosh has some work experience in the fields of asylum seeking and refugee law with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and has accomplished Master’s Degrees in international human rights law and public international and comparative law. She is also the editor for the special section of the Finnish Yearbook of International Law (FYBIL). Her areas of research include human rights law, immigration law, refugee law, laws concerning human trafficking, border studies, and critical security analysis.
Massimo Fichera is Academy of Finland Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor of EU Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki. He was previously, in the same University, Lecturer in European Studies at the Network for European Studies, and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki. His interests lie in constitutional theory and European Union Law broadly conceived. Before joining the University of Helsinki, he completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh and carried out research during his internships in international organisations, including the European Commission and the United Nations. He holds a degree in Law (University of Messina) and a Master in International Affairs (ISPI, Milan) and qualified as Avvocato in Italy.
He is currently writing a monograph on "The Foundations of the EU as a Polity" (Edward Elgar)
Ismail Ertürk is currently Senior Lecturer in Banking and Director for Social Responsibility and Engagement at Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester. His research focuses on financialization in present day capitalism exploring in particular the themes of financial innovation and corporate governance from a cultural political economy perspective. He has also carried out interdisciplinary research on the transformation of banking in a financialised global economy and its contribution to the 2007 crisis and financial instability. His recent work is about re-conceptualisation of post-crisis central bank unconventional monetary policies as destabilising interventions in a financialised economy and knowledge problems in post-crisis regulatory macroeconomics of international financial institutions. He has practical experience in global banking and business through advisory work and executive education. He co-edited multidisciplinary Routledge Companion to Bank Regulation and Reform(Routledge 2017) and Financialization at Work (Routledge 2017), and co-authored After the Great Complacence: Financial Crisis and the Politics of Reform (OUP 2011). He has widely published interdisciplinary work in academic journals like Economy and Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy. He has collaborated with contemporary artists in art projects that reflect upon representation, value and knowledge in historical and contemporary practices and theories regarding money and finance. He regularly comments on finance and banking on international media, including BBC, Bloomberg TV, Channel 4, Russia Today, Financial Times, The Observer, Reuters Insider, The Telegraph, The Huffington Post, Washington Post.
Susan Gal is Mae and Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago; currently she is also Director of the Center for East European, Russian and Eurasian Studies.
She received her PhD. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. Her areas of research specialization include: linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, multilingualism, variation and differentiation, gender differences, dialectology, language and political economy, linguistic ideologies, Hungarian and German. She has also written about translation and the materiality of linguistic practices.
Gal’s current research in Europe examines the way people use language in everyday life, tracking the connection between language and political economy. She is interested in how standard national languages constrain minority-language speakers, and how translation connects but also separates populations of speakers. Although multilingualism is increasingly valued for some, it co-exists with the devaluation of immigrant linguistic practices. For her, discourses around language are a rich and important source of evidence about social life, their exploration reveals the nature of discordant cultural values, political tensions, and the possibilities of negotiation.
Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne and the founding Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He conducts ethnographic research on law, social and political change, and culture and is the author or editor of twelve books, including Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction (NYU Press, 2017), UNESCO Surveys the World: A Prehistory of Human Rights (ed., forthcoming with Stanford UP, 2018), Human Rights at the Crossroads (ed., Oxford UP, 2012), Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era (with Kamari Maxine Clarke, Cambridge UP, 2010), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford UP, 2009), Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford UP, 2008), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (with Sally Engle Merry, Cambridge UP, 2007). He is currently working on a study of law, ideology, and social change in Bolivia based on several years of research funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Monica Heller is a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Toronto (Canada). She is a past president of the American Anthropological Association, a member of the Royal Society of Canada, and incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sociolinguistics. Her work focusses on the role of language in the making of social difference and social inequality, in particular on social categorization and the legitimization of relations of power. Her fieldwork focusses on changing ideas about language, nation, space and state in different political economic conditions, with an emphasis on francophone Canada, though she also collaborates on projects in Catalunya, northern Finland and Switzerland. Besides the Journal of Sociolinguistics, she has published in such journals as Language in Society, Langage et Société and Anthropologie et société. Two books she has co-authored will be published in 2017: Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Towards a Critical History (with Bonnie McElhinny, University of Toronto Press), and Critical Sociolinguistic Research Methods: How to Study Language Issues that Matter (with Sari Pietikäinen and Joan Pujolar, Routledge).
Katja Kahlina is a visiting researcher at the Gender Studies unit, University of Helsinki. She has a PhD in Comparative Gender Studies from Central European University (CEU). Katja’s research commitments are to the study of sexual politics and political discourse as they are culturally and geopolitically produced and entangled. The focus of her research has mostly been on the Balkans and the wider region of Eastern Europe, addressing the ways in which the sexualised borders in Europe have been productive of (counter-)desire for belonging and state sovereignty. Before joining the University of Helsinki, Katja worked at the University of Edinburgh as a Research Fellow on the CITSEE (Europeanisation of Citizenship in the Successor States of the Former Yugoslavia) project and as a member of Global Justice Academy.
Keir Martin is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was previously Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His work has focussed on contests over the limits of reciprocal obligation and their role in shaping the boundaries of businesses and other social entities. He conducted his main fieldwork in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. This work culminated in the publication of his 2013 monograph, The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain. He is currently working on a book on the changing nature of the corporation in the 21st century alongside Adam Leaver of Manchester Business School, and an edited collection on the relationship between psychotherapy and anthropology. He has published on the contemporary global political economy in a wide variety of academic and media outlets, including The Financial Times and The Guardian.
Vlad Naumescu is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, Romania and South India on questions of religious transmission in Eastern Christianity, looking at practices, institutions and politics that shape Orthodox communities in different localities. His most recent research brings these cases together into a comparative study of pedagogies of prayer in the Eastern Churches. He is the author of Modes of Religiosity in Eastern Christianity: Religious Processes and Social Change in Ukraine (Lit 2007), co-editor of Churches In-between: Greek Catholic Churches in Postsocialist Europe (Lit 2008), a special issue on Learning Spirit Possession (Ethnos 2012) and several articles exploring among others, politics of memory and religious institutionalization, time and temporality in Orthodoxy, virtue ethics and personhood, religious-secular formations in state socialism. Naumescu combines ethnography with filmmaking in his research, producing several documentary films that speak to his writings: Birds’ Way (2009), Bread of Life: The Word/The Silence (2014). He is currently working on a book project that explores ritual, history and ethics in the Old Belief.
James Wesley Scott is Professor of Regional and Border Studies at the Karelian Institute at the University of Eastern Finland. Prof. Scott obtained his Habilitation (2006), PhD (1990) and MA (1986) at the Free University of Berlin and his B.Sc. at the University of California Berkeley (1979). Among his research interests are: urban and regional development policy, geopolitics, border studies, transboundary regionalism in Europe and North America Changes and the spatial implications of Eastern and Central European transformation processes. Since 2003, he has coordinated European research projects on borders and cross-border cooperation within the EU’s Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Framework Programmes and with support from the European Research Council and the Academy of Finland. He is presently scientific coordinator of the Horizons 2020 project RELOCAL (Resituating the Local in Cohesion Policy) and coordinator of GLASE (Multilayered Borders of Global Security), funded by the Academy of Finland’s Strategic Research Council.
Lydia Smith is Head of NIAB Innovation Farm and EA Innovation Hub at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridge UK; where she has been based since 1997. She leads Interactive farmer-facing research into sustainable farming; especially crop genetic improvement and waste minimisation. Her first roles in research were in plant pathology with roles at ADAS and East Malling research. Following a doctorate in plant microbial ecology, she subsequently lectured in soil science, crop microbial interactions, environmental biology and land reclamation at Universities of E. London and Luton. At NIAB, Lydia built up the research remit broadly at NIAB and personally focussed on crop product improvement, especially with respect to authenticity and quality of products.
Lydia’s research then shifted towards improvement of plant genetic resources and new methods for their utilisation and characterisation; leading within the novel and non food crop areas, building up a portfolio of projects over 12 years; particularly concerned with plant genetic improvement for bio-pharmaceutical and probiotic applications. The need for industry participation and demonstration in this area led to the ’Innovation Farm’ concept, a new venture, conceived and set up by Lydia. It now provides a practical grower-facing research facility, with knowledge exchange and route to application for end-users in industry at its core (www.InnovationFarm.co.uk). It interacts with the UK’s major research players in Agri/Hort crop research; driving utilisation and understanding of research and innovation through to industry, policy makers and consumers. Since 2016, she is also now leading the East Agri-tech Innovation Hub (www.innovationHubuk.co.uk); providing a pilot study resource for farmers and researchers to minimise waste in farming – or to reuse selected waste for new, higher value products.
She remains committed to genetic improvement and crop microbial interactions of forage legumes with probiotic applications.
Pekka Tuominen: PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology, currently Post-Doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. His research deals with the sociocultural dimensions of urban transformation in Istanbul and he has recently initiated a multidisciplinary research project in the stigmatised Kontula district of Helsinki, studying the urban transformation of the area and examining new possibilities of participatory urban culture connecting its neighbourhoods.