Carli Coetzee
Carli Coetzee is the editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies and the founder of the Journal Work Academy. Her work as an editor is part of a larger activist project that seeks to change publishing patterns that privilege northern-based scholars and institutions. She frequently takes part in research and early-career mentoring workshops hosted by African universities and organisations. Her published work includes Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid (editor), Written Under the Skin: Blood and Transgenerational Memory in South Africa (monograph), Routledge Handbook of African Literature (co-editor), Negotiating the Past and Afropolitanism: Reboot (co-editor), and many articles on African literature and the ethics of north-south interactions. She is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Literature, Language and Media at Wits University, and a Research Associate at Oxford University’s African Studies Centre. She is the Vice-President of the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) and the Chair of the Publications Committee of the Lagos Studies Association.
Serawit B. Debele
Serawit B. Debele (PhD) is a Junior Research Group Leader in the Africa-Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her current work focuses on queer subjectivities in moments of political transformation in Ethiopia, Tunisia and Sudan. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Bayreuth/BIGSAS in 2015.
Raga Makawi
Raga Makawi is the principal editor at the African Arguments (currently with Hurst, previously with Zed) book series blog. She is Assistant Book Reviews Editor and Social Media Editor at Africa, International African Institute. She previously worked as Commissioning Editor at Zed books. She is an experienced editor and developmental professional with ten years’ experience working with publishing bodies, civil right groups, and government and UN agencies in program design, planning, management and implementation. She is bilingual (Arabic and English) with extensive experience in research, gender equality programming, co-ordination, information management and communication, humanitarian financing, proposal writing and project management.
Parfait D. Akana
Parfait D. Akana is an anthropologist and sociologist. He holds Masters in Anthropology and Information and Communication Sciences from the Universities of Yaounde I and IIa, a PhD in Sociology at École des Hautes Études en Sciences, Paris and a University Degree in Transcultural Psychiatry at University of Paris 13. His research areas are mental health, Covid-19, sexual and gender-based violence, digital cultures, media and politics. He is the PhD and Master’s Program coordinator at the Advanced School of Mass Communication, Cameroon. He is the Executive Director of The Muntu Institute (African Humanities and Social Sciences), editor of the Social Scientists Initiative against Covid-19 in Cameroon and advisory member of the online publication Corona Times. His recent edited books are L’Afrique à l’épreuve de la Covid-19 (Langaa & Muntu Institute Press) and Réflexivités africaines (Muntu Institute Press & Jimsaan).
Khwezi Mkhize
Khwezi Mkhize is a lecturer in the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), South Africa. He graduated with a PhD from the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, US. His research interests include African literature, South African literature, empire and colonialism studies, postcolonial theory, Pan-Africanism and the black diaspora. He has published in journals such as The Black Scholar, Safundi, Scrutiny2, Social Dynamics and the Journal of Commonwealth Literatures. He served on the editorial board of African Studies and is currently working on his first book manuscript.
Jordanna Matlon
Jordanna Matlon is an urban sociologist who studies racial capitalism and the articulation of Black masculinity in Africa and the African diaspora. She is generally interested in the ways “Blackness” operates as a signifier, and as it intersects with gender norms, manifests in popular culture, and illuminates our understanding of political economy. Her book A Man Among Other Men: The Long Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism is under contract with Cornell University Press.
Ntone Edjabe
Ntone Edjabe is the founder, among many other initiatives, of Chimurenga Magazine, a pan-African publication of culture, art, and politics based in Cape Town, and the Pan African Space Station (PASS), an Internet radio platform streamed live across the African world. “Chimurenga” refers to the Shona word for “struggle” and a popular music genre in Zimbabwe. Edjabe’s practice as a radio DJ merges musical erudition and explicit political engagement centred on Africa’s place in the world.
Mandisa Mbali
Mandisa Mbali is a senior lecturer in Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and previously taught Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She obtained her doctoral degree in Modern History at Oxford University, UK. Her research interests are health policy and activism, considered historically, as interrelated phenomena, both transnationally and within South Africa. She has explored this theme in book chapters and journal articles on AIDS activism and policies, health, gender and sexuality and the politics of race and ethics in international health. Her scholarly monograph South African AIDS Activism and Global Health Politics was published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of their Global Ethics series; she completed the publication during her postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. More recently, her work analyses transnational debates over apartheid and medical humanitarianism in late twentieth-century South Africa.
Vito Laterza
Vito Laterza is Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development and Planning and the Centre for Digital Transformation (CeDiT) at the University of Agder, Norway. He is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is an anthropologist, development scholar and political analyst with an interdisciplinary orientation spanning two main areas: political economy and ecology, and communication studies. His work focuses on higher education, digital technologies, political communication, environment and climate change, labour and organisations, socio-economic inequalities, and social and political mobilisation. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies and a founder and chief editor of the public engagement blog Corona Times. He holds a BSc in Employment Relations & Human Resource Management from the London School of Economics and an MPhil in Social Anthropological Research and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, UK.