Brenda Chalfin is Director of the Center for African Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. With a longstanding interest in borders zones, built environments, and state processes in West Africa, Chalfin is the author of Shea Butter Republic: State Power, Global Markets and the Making of an Indigenous Commodity (2004) and Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa (2010). She is completing a new book manuscript on waste, infrastructure and the boundaries of private and public life in Ghana’s high-modernist city of Tema.
Jane Cowan is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Sussex Rights and Justice Research Centre at the University of Sussex in Brighton UK, where she has taught since 1991. American born and educated, she received her BA from Macalester College and her MA and PhD in anthropology and ethnomusicology from Indiana University, Bloomington. Cowan’s first book, Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece (Princeton 1990; Winner of the Chicago Folklore Prize), explored the ways that gender, power and identity were embodied, performed and negotiated within social dancing in a small Greek town.
Cowan’s years of fieldwork in this multilingual, multi-ethnic and multi-religious border region of Greek Macedonia alerted her to the local population’s complex responses to nation-building practices over the 19th and 20th centuries, a theme taken up in her edited book, Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference (Pluto 2000). When, confronted with an emerging Movement for Macedonian Human Rights around the town of Florina in northwest Greece in the early 1990s, many from her fieldsite east of Thessaloniki expressed scepticism, protesting that “we are not a minority”, this disjuncture of sentiments among members of the “same” population was the empirical starting point for a broader theorization of the relations between culture and rights (developed in Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives, Cambridge 2001, co-edited with MB Dembour and RA Wilson). She was inspired to ask, “when and where is a minority?” (not “what?”) and to reflect on the located nature and contingent political conditions in which minoritisation emerges as well as the ambiguities of a seemingly emancipatory discourse.
Intrigued by the mutability and situational politics of ethnic and national categorization in contemporary Macedonia (and southeast Europe generally), Cowan sought to develop a longer-term perspective. In 1998, she entered the League of Nations Archives where she has been examining petitions for rights and protections as well as for Macedonian nationhood. Just as importantly, she is analysing the interactions these petitions generated between minority claimants, international civil servants, Western European feminists, pacifists and internationalists, civic organisations, revolutionaries, diplomats and the press. This research demonstrates continuities between elite Europeans’ interest in Ottoman and Hapsburg subject nationalities and their post-First World War involvement as League protagonists in minorities treaty supervision in imagining, defining and overseeing the regulation of difference of populations in the region’s new states. It reveals, moreover, the highly contested consolidation of “minority” as a legal-political category in this period.
Cowan is also currently writing a book (with Julie Billaud) on the contemporary moment of international oversight of rights. Based on their ethnographic fieldwork at the United Nations in Geneva since 2010, they are exploring the social processes and contested meanings of the Universal Periodic Review, a new human rights monitoring mechanism dubbed the ‘success story’ of the reformed United Nations human rights system.
Her work has been supported by grants from the Macarthur Foundation, the British Academy, Leverhulme and a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Fellowship in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962) is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. Much of his professional work has concerned cultural dynamics in complex society, and he is widely known for his much used and translated textbooks in anthropology, notably “Small Places, Large Issues”, “Ethnicity and Nationalism” and “What is Anthropology?". In 2015, he published a biography of Fredrik Barth. Currently, he is carrying out research on the dilemmas of fossil fuels, the climate crisis and sustainability. His latest book, “Overheating: An anthropology of accelerated change” (2016), addresses these issues in an engaging and accessible way. He is currently completing a book about the predicament of growth and sustainability in an Australian industrial town.
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.
Éric Fassin is a professor of sociology at Paris-8 University in the Departement of Political Science and the Department of Gender Studies (after 5 years at New York University and 18 years at École normale supérieure in Paris), and a researcher affiliated with the Laboratoire d’études de genre et de sexualité (LEGS, CNRS/Paris-8/Paris-Ouest). His research focuses on contemporary sexual and racial politics, in particular in France and the United States, and the politics of immigration and national identity. He has co-founded a network in defense of gender studies called “The Gender International.” Latest book : Populisme : le grand ressentiment (Textuel, 2017, translated into 6 languages). He has also edited special issues of Politix, Public Culture, Raison Publique, Contemporary French Civilization, Raisons politiques, differences.
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).
Christoffer Kølvraa is Associate Professor in European studies at the School for Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark. His main research interests have focused on the EU institutions’ and actor’s construction of European identity – especially as embedded in various elements of European foreign- and borderpolicies. He has worked extensively on the European neighborhood policy and its implication for constructing/excluding the East (of Europe) – as published in his 2012 book ‘Imagining Europe as a Global Player’.
In addition to this he has done research on the role of affect and desire in political discourses, exploring this especially in relation to the European resurgence of Extreme and Far Right movements and parties. Most recently he has been part of a successful Horizon2020 application, which has secured him funding for a project investigating the (repressed) status of colonialism as a common European Heritage in EU discourses and cultural policies.
His most recent publications include: Limits of Attraction: The EU’s Eastern Border and the European Neighbourhood Policy. East European Politics & Societies. 31(1), 2017, European Fantasies: On the EU's Political Myths and the Affective Potential of Utopian Imaginaries for European Identity. Journal of Common Market Studies, 54(1), 2016, Affect, Provocation and Far Right Rhetoric. In ‘Affective methodologies’, Palgrave Macmillan 2015: ,Space and Spirit in the Colonial Imagination after the First World War. in ‘Zero Hours’, Peter Lang 2015
Merete Mazzarella has been professor of Nordic literature at The University of Helsinki and is the author of 26 books: novels, biographies, autobiography and essays on subjects ranging from identity and ageing to medical humanities. Her most recent book is Den försiktiga resenären (The Cautious Traveller) 2019. She regularly writes columns and essays for Swedish and Finland-Swedish newspapers and teaches courses on the essay and on autobiographical writing. She also has an honorary doctorate in medicine from Uppsala University.
Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain. Her main research focus has been on multiple forms of access to livelihood, on care practices within and across generations, and on the historical bases of conflict. Her work is inspired by theories of radical political economy, critical geography, moral economies and feminist economics.
She was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant to study the effects of austerity on Southern European livelihoods (Grassroots Economics [GRECO]) http://www.ub.edu/grassrootseconomics/ . This project engages with everyday practices of getting by and with the models and theories about economic processes that ordinary people develop through reflecting on their experiences and evaluating their opportunities against the backdrop of state policies and expert discourses. Results will open new theoretical ground addressing how present-day economic insecurity affects the institutional stability of European polities.
Her most recent writing includes “On Waging the Ideological War: Against the Hegemony of Form” Anthropological Theory, Vol. 16(2-3): 263-284, 2016 (OA);
“Where Have All the Peasants Gone?” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 45:19.1–19.18, 2016; “Between inequality and injustice: dignity as a motive for mobilization during the crisis” History and Anthropology, Vol.27 (1): 74-92, 2016; and (with N. Besnier) “Crisis, Value, Hope: Rethinking the Economy”, Current Anthropology V. 55 (S9):4-16, 2014 (OA). She has co-edited with V. Goddard two volumes on the re-structuring of industry and its impact on working class livelihoods: Work and Livelihoods – History, Ethnography and Models in Times of Crisis, Routledge, 2016; and Industry and Work in Contemporary Capitalism, Routledge, 2015.
Anssi Paasi has been Professor of Geography at the University of Oulu since 1989 and Docent of Human Geography at the University of Eastern Finland since 1987. He served as an Academy Professor in Finnish Academy during the period 2008-2012 and has been the Director of the RELATE Center of Excellence, funded by the Academy of Finland and the Universities of Oulu, Tampere and Helsinki, during 2014-2019.
He has published numerous articles and chapters on spatial/political geographic theory, concepts and processes (e.g. regions/territories, borders/boundaries/bordering, and spatial identity and memory) in geographical and political science journals and edited collections. He is also interested in power-knowledge relations in the contemporary neoliberal academy.
His books include Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness (Wiley 1996) and J.G.Granö: Pure Geography (Johns Hopkins University Press 1997). He has served recently as a co-editor of the Handbook of Human Geography I-II (Sage, 2014), The New European Frontiers: Social and Spatial (Re)-Integration Issues in Multicultural and Border Regions (Cambridge Scholars 2014), Regional Worlds: Advancing the Geography of Regions (Routledge 2015) and the Handbook on the Geographies of Regions and Territories (Elgar 2018). His most recent co-edited volume is Borderless Worlds for Whom? Ethics, Moralities and Mobilities (Routledge 2019).
Tuija Pulkkinen is professor of gender studies at the University of Helsinki. She was a vice director of the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change in 2006-2011, and Academy professor 2011-2015. She is an expert on feminist theory, political thought, and the history of ideas and concepts. She has studied 19th century nationalist thought, Hegel’s philosophy, the history of the concept of state, the 20th century French thought (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard) and Hannah Arendt, as well as contemporary feminist theory. Her publications include The Postmodern and Political Agency (SoPhi 2000), and she has co-edited The Ashgate Research Companion to the Politics of Democratization in Europe (2009) and Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought (Palgrave 2010), as well as co-translated Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble into Finnish (2006). In her more recent work she has concentrated on the politics of philosophy in contemporary feminist theory, and has published articles on topics such as ”The Role of Darwin in Elizabeth Grosz’s Deleuzian Feminist Theory” (Hypatia 32:2, 2017), and on the use of key concepts in Adriana Cavarero’s and Judith Butler’s texts. She is also the editor-in-chief of the journal Redescriptions – Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory.
Tracey Rosen is a College Fellow and Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2015 and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University between 2016-2017. Her interests include the relationship between global trade, migration, and collective value and she is currently developing a book exploring the impact of 21st century Chinese migration and trade in Europe and, more specifically, Greece. Based off of three years of ethnographic fieldwork among both Chinese and Greek merchants, the book is conceived as an ethnography of advanced, global capitalism that examines the nexus of self/other representation and economic practice.
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.
Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg, and Editor-in-Chief of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, the journal of European Association for Social Anthropologists (EASA). He graduated in History/Ethnography from Moscow State University (1987), and received MA (1991) and PhD (1998) in Anthropology from Stanford. He specialises in Siberia and Russia, but also have carried out research in Britain and the United States. Research interests include anthropology and history of the state and governance, theories of exchange and performativity. Publications include monographs Two Lenins: A Brief Anthropology of Time (HAU Malinowski Monograph Series and Chicago University Press, 2017) and The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia (Stanford University Press 2003,) an edited volume The Topography of happiness: ethnographic contours of modernity (in Russian: Topografia schastia: etnograficheskie karty moderna Moscow: New Literary Observer Publishers 2013) and; Gifts to Soviet leaders. Exhibition Catalogue (Moscow: Pinakotheke 2006).
Kaius Tuori is an Associate Professor of European Intellectual History at the University
of Helsinki, Finland. A scholar of legal history involved in research projects on the
understanding of tradition, culture, identity, memory, and the uses of the past, he is the
author of The Emperor of Law: The Emergence of Roman Imperial Adjudication (Oxford
University Press, 2016) and Lawyers and Savages: Ancient History and Legal Realism in
the Making of Legal Anthropology (Routledge, 2014).