Divine Fuh

Fuh joined the University of Cape Town in 2012 from the University of Basel in Switzerland where he was a senior researcher/lecturer in the Chair for Research and Methodology, Institute for Sociology. He coordinates the Research Group “Fixing the City”, with research interests in youth, agency, uncertainty, entrepreneurship and urbanity. His research examines the ways in which people seek ways of ‘smiling’ in the midst of ‘suffering’. His writing engages with the basic question of how male youth in African cities cope with the many challenges that the weakness of the state, the economy and the many aspects of the on-going processes of globalisation provokes. It explores how urban youth develop new modes of agency that allows them to maintain an active attitude despite the permanent difficulties of finding a place in a society that apparently does not have one for them.

Chimaraoke Izugbara

Chimaraoke Izugbara, director, Research Capacity Strengthening Division (which houses CARTA), and head, Population Dynamics and Reproductive Health research program at the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), holds two PhDs - in social anthropology and social work from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.  He has taught in universities in the US, Europe, and Africa. An honorary professor at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and lecturer-at-large at the University of Uyo, Nigeria, Chimaraoke has authored over a hundred peer-reviewed scholarly papers in leading social science and public health journals. Chimaraoke’s research interests are in sexuality, gender, and health. His recent book, Women’s Health in Africa: Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities (2015), is published by Routledge, London.

Julie Livingston

Julie Livingston is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, where she is also affiliated with the anthropology department. She is interested in the human body as a moral condition and mode of consciousness, in care as a social practice, and in taxonomy and relationships that upend or complicate it. Her work is at the intersection of history, anthropology, and public health. She is the author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana, and numerous articles and essays on topics including aging, disability, disgust, suicide, and medical photography. Livingston is the recipient of the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing (2013), the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Welcome Medal (2012), and the American Association for the History of Medicine’s William Welch Medal (2014). 

Joe Lugalla

Dr. Joe Lugalla is the Director of the  Institute for Educational Development, East Africa (IED, EA) of Aga Khan University in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He was born and raised in Tanzania. After training as a teacher, he taught in both elementary and secondary schools before returning to studies at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1979. He obtained a BA (Honours) in Sociology in 1982 and subsequently joined the University as a Tutorial Assistant in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. In 1984, he received his MA in Sociology/Anthropology. Dr Lugalla completed his PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Bremen (1990) and a Post-Doctoral Diploma in Higher Education and International Development from the University of Kassel (1990).

In 1991, Dr. Lugalla returned to the University of Dar es Salaam to serve as the Head of the Department of Sociology.  During 1993-94, he served as Research Fellow, Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School. In 1994, he was appointed as Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of New Hampshire. He became Professor in 2004 and Chair of the same department in 2007 – a position he held until June 2014. Joe also served as the President of the Tanzanian Studies Association, an affiliate of the African Studies Association of America.

Hlonipha Mokoena

Hlonipha Mokoena received her Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town in 2005. She is currently an associate professor and researcher at WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her articles have been published in: Journal of Natal and Zulu History; Journal of Religion in Africa; Journal of Southern African Studies; Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa and Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing. She has contributed opinion pieces and book reviews to: African Studies Review; History & Theory; The Politics of Jacob Zuma, ACAS Bulletin No. 84; the blog “Africa is a Country” and the exhibition “PASS-AGES: References & Footnotes”. 

Her first book is on Magema M. Fuze, author of the Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona (1922) / The Black People and Whence They Came (1979). The book is titled Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual. The basic argument she presents in the book is that as an author and an aspirant historian Fuze represents a set of questions about the emergence and arrested development of a black intelligentsia and literati in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Africa. His life and writings reveal both his singular attempt to create, under adverse cultural, political and social conditions, a literary career and a body of knowledge while also participating in the constitution of a discourse community or a public sphere of Zulu-speaking intellectuals.

Vinh-Kim Nguyen

Vinh-Kim Nguyen is an HIV and Emergency physician and medical anthropologist. As both practitioner and researcher, he is concerned with the relationship between science, politics and practice in global health. He practices Emergency Medicine at Avicenna Hospital in Paris and the Jewish General Hospital in Montréal, currently holds an ERC Consolidator Grant (Research Chair) on the science and politics of a world without AIDS and heads a team of anthropologists researching the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. He is Professor in the School of Public Health the University of Montreal where he leads the PhD track in Global Health, and Professor of Anthropology and Sociology of Development in the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva; he also holds an honorary chair at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris which hosts researchers working on global health issues. Since 1994 he has worked extensively with community organisations responding to the HIV epidemic in West Africa as a trainer and physician. This work informed his anthropological research on the global response to HIV with a concern for the forms of triage and sovereignty they embody. He continues to follow the evolving scientific and political response to HIV and Ebola in his current work. He draws on molecular epidemiology, global health and social theory to argue for a paradigm shift in eliminating infectious diseases. He is the author of The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa's Time of AIDS; coauthor, with Margaret Lock, of An Anthropology of Biomedicine and also the co-editor, with Jennifer Klot, of The Fourth Wave: Violence, Gender, Culture, and HIV in the 21st Century, as well as numerous articles in biomedical and anthropological journals.

Joyce Nyoni

Dr. Joyce Nyoni is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Dar es Salaam. For the past ten years she has been working in the field of HIV prevention. Her work in the field has ranged from HIV communication intervention, to PMTCT and childhood transmission of HIV, to working with hidden populations such as men who have sex with men and female sex workers. Dr. Nyoni has also worked on research on strengthening community health systems for HIV treatment, support and care. She is currently working on a project that has developed a model (SPEND) to ease access to HIV/AIDS treatment and care among men who have sex with men in Tanzania. 

Rachel Spronk

Rachel Spronk is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She works at the intersection of three scholarly fields - anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, and African studies. She studies the development of the middle classes in Kenya and Ghana and how those social transformation relate to changes in gender, sexuality and self-perceptions. She focusses particularly on the interface between sexuality and the middle classes, examining problematic assumptions behind both terms, and theorizing the middle class as a desirable position and thus as a classification-in-the-making that arises from (shifting) ideas of distinction. In her work she combines the ethnographic study of lived experience with the task of rethinking our theoretical repertoires.