Sally Babidge is a senior lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Queensland. Current research examines the sociocultural understanding of extractive development and negotiations between mining companies and indigenous communities in northern Chile. She is also the author of Aboriginal family and the state (2010) regarding indigenous history and territorial claims in Australia.
Madeleine Belfrage has a Masters of Development Practice from the University of Queensland and is currently Senior Project Officer at Equidad de Género: Ciudadanía, Trabajo y Familia A.C. in Mexico City.
Arturo Escobar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His main interests are: political ecology, ontological design, and the anthropology of development, social movements, and technoscience. His most recent books are Sentipensar con la Tierra. Nuevas lecturas sobre desarrollo, territorio y diferencia (2014); and Designs for the Pluriverse: radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (2018).
Godfrey Museka is a Religion and Ethics Education lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, where he is currently reading for a doctoral degree. His research interests include African medical systems, health and well-being in indigenous religion, religion and gender and unhu/ubuntu moral philosophy. His publications include ‘Medical pluralism and the quest for therapy: The dilemma of HIV and AIDS patients in Zimbabwe’s rural Gandanzara area’ and ‘Patriarchy and genderbased violence: The politics of exclusion in Zimbabwe’s Roman Catholic church’.
Mélodine Sommier is an assistant professor in Intercultural Communication at the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her main research interests include critical and discursive approaches within the field of intercultural communication. Her current research projects explore intersections between culture, race, and religion, as well as expressions of race and racism.
Eric H Thomas is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He earned his master’s degree in 2016, writing his thesis on practices among leñeros (woodcutters and transporters) in the Aysén region in Southern Chile. His current work focuses on state-driven economic development, particularly of the aquaculture and timber industries, and its effect on coastal populations living in Patagonia. He is also interested in internal labor migrations and historical and contemporary responses to government development and conservation efforts.
Susan Visvanathan is the author of The Christians of Kerala (OUP, 1993), Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism (Orient Blackswan, 2007) and The Children of Nature (Roli, 2010). She is the editor of Structure and Transformation (OUP, 2001) and Culture and Society (Sage, 2014). She is Professor of Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University and is also a well-known writer of literary fiction. Her most recent novella is Adi Sankara and Other Stories (Papyrus, 2017).
Leon Wainwright is Reader in Art History at The Open University, United Kingdom, and the author of Phenomenal Difference: A Philosophy of Black British Art (Liverpool University Press, 2017), Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester University Press, 2011), and editor or co-editor of numerous books and collections on modern and contemporary art, museology and anthropology. A former long-standing member of the editorial board of the journal Third Text, and founding editor of the Open Arts Journal, he is a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in the History of Art.
Paige West is The Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. Her broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments. Since the mid-1990s, she has worked with indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. She is the author of three books and the editor of five more. Dr West is the founder of the journal Environment and Society, the chair of the Ecology and Culture University Seminar at Columbia University, a fellow (and past chair) of the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania, and is the past president of the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association. In addition to her academic work, Dr West is the co-founder, and a board member, of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small non-profit organization (NGO) dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans. Dr West is also the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and Western scientific knowledge.
