Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Chair
Francis B. Nyamnjoh holds a BA and an MA from the University of Yaounde, Cameroon, and a PhD from the University of Leicester, UK. He joined the University of Cape Town in August 2009 as Professor of Social Anthropology from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), where he served as Head of Publications (2003–2009). He has taught sociology, anthropology and communication studies at universities in Cameroon and Botswana. He is the recipient of many awards, including the "ASU African Hero 2013" of the African Students Union, Ohio University, USA, the Eko Prize for African Literature (2014); and of the ASAUK Fage & Oliver Prize for the best monograph (2018) for his book #RhodesMustFall. He is a B1-rated researcher by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF). He is a Fellow of the Cameroon Academy of Science, the African Academy of Science and Academy of Science of South Africa. He is Chair of the Board of Langaa Research and Publishing Centre, Cameroon and was Chair of the Editorial Board of the South African Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press (2011–2019). His scholarly books include Africa's Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging (2005), Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (2006), C'est l'homme qui fait l'homme: Cul-de-Sac Ubuntu-ism in Côte d'Ivoire (2015), #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (2016), Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds (2017), Eating and Being Eaten: Cannibalism as Food for Thought (2018), and The Rational Consumer: Bad for Business and Politics: Democracy at the Crossroads of Nature and Culture (2018).
Jaya Raju
Jaya Raju is a professor and Head of the Department of Knowledge and Information Stewardship at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town, South Africa. She holds a PhD in Information Studies (University of KwaZulu-Natal) and is an NRF rated researcher. Her area of research is Library and/or Information Science (LIS) education and its epistemological implications for the discipline as well as for professional practice, particularly in the African developing context. She was Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science (2012–2018); serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of several journals, such as the African Journal of Libraries, Archives and Information Science, International Journal of Information, Diversity & Inclusion, Open Information Science, Libri: International Journal of Libraries and Information Studies and the African Journal of Communication & Information Science. She is co-editor of the ALISE (Association for Library and Information Science Education) Book Series on LIS education and research and the International Insights Column of College & Research Libraries News. She also serves as Subject Chair (LIS and multi-disciplinary journals) on the Scopus Content Selection & Advisory Board, an international group of scientists and researchers representing major scientific disciplines and tasked with evaluating journals applying for inclusion on the Scopus indexing list.
Kopano Ratele
Kopano Ratele is a professor in the Institute of Social and Health Sciences (ISHS) at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and researcher in the Violence, Injury & Peace Research Unit. He runs the Research Unit on Men & Masculinities and the Transdisciplinary African Psychologies Programme. He was a professor at the University of Western Cape in the Department of Psychology and in Women & Gender Studies. He has also been co-director of the South African Medical Research Council-UNISA Violence, Injury & Peace Research Unit and President of the Psychological Society of South Africa (2009-2010). He chaired the board of Sonke Gender Justice, a South African non-governmental organisation working across Africa to strengthen government, civil society and citizen capacity to promote gender equality, prevent domestic and sexual violence, and reduce the spread and impact of HIV and AIDS. He is best known for his work on issues of identity, violence, sexuality, and masculinity. He has an extensive list of scholarly articles, books, and presentations delivered around the world. He has edited and co-edited the books From Boys to Men: Social Construction of Masculinities in Contemporary Society and Inter-Group relations: South African Perspectives. His latest book is There was this goat, co-authored with Nosisi Mpolweni and Antjie Krog. He is editor-in-chief of African Safety Promotion: A Journal of Injury and Violence Prevention and books editor of the South African Journal of Psychology.
Akosua Adomako Ampofo
Akosua Adomako Ampofo is Professor of African and Gender Studies at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana (UG). She is the founding Director of UG’s Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy and former Director of the Institute of African Studies at UG (2010–2015). She is the President of the African Studies Association of Africa and honorary Professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. She considers herself an activist-scholar; at the heart of her work are questions of identity and power – within families, institutions, political and religious spaces, and the knowledge industry. Among other publications, she is the co-editor of the books (with Josephine Beoku-Betts) Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South (2020), published by Emerald Publishing and (with Cheryl Rodriguez and Dzodzi Tsikata) Transatlantic Feminisms: Women’s and Gender Studies in Africa and the Diaspora (2015), published by Lexington Books. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Contemporary Journal of African Studies and Co-Editor of the blog Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa.
Maxine Kamari Clarke
M. Kamari Clarke is a professor at the University of Los Angeles in the Department of Anthropology. Over her career she has taught at Yale University (1999–2012), the University of Pennsylvania (2012-2014), Carleton University (2015–2019), the University Toronto (2014–2015, 2020), and was the former chair of the Council on African Studies at Yale (2007–2010). For more than twenty years, she conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, international legal domains, religious nationalism and the politics of globalisation and race. She has spent her career exploring theoretical questions of culture and power and in the field of law and anthropology detailing the relationship between new social formations and contemporary problems. One of her key contributions to the various disciplines that she inhabits has been to demonstrate ethnographically the ways that legal and religious knowledge regimes produce practices that travel globally. By mapping the way that particular cultural forms travel, and by highlighting why and how some travel more than others, she has quickly established herself as a leader in this area and a central interlocutor into new ways of managing power and regulating social practices.
Aghi Bahi
Aghi Bahi holds a Doctorate in Information and Communication Sciences (Université Lumière Lyon 2, 1994) and obtained the habilitation to supervise research (ENS de Lyon, 2014) in the same research field. He is Professor of Anthropology of Communication at the UFR Information Communication & Arts (Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny) of Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire. His current work in Côte d'Ivoire is focused on three key questions examined within the framework of his research group on the anthropology of communication: uses of information and communication technologies in Côte d'Ivoire, media politics and public spaces, media and popular culture. Among his recent publications are L'ivoirité mouvementée et Anthropo-logiques de la communication published by Langaa RCPIG.
Elísio Macamo
Elísio Macamo is Tenure Track Assistant Professor of African Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland and a Research Fellow at the Centro de Estudos Internacionais – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (CEI-IUL), Portugal. He taught development sociology at the University of Bayreuth, Germany and was a founding member of the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies. He was born and grew up in Mozambique. He studied in Maputo (Mozambique), Salford, and London (UK) and Bayreuth (Germany). He holds an MA in Translation and Interpreting (Salford), an MA in Sociology (University of North London), as well as a PhD and a Habilitation in Sociology (University of Bayreuth). He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Bayreuth, an AGORA-Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin and a visiting lecturer at Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique. He regularly offers methodological workshops to Portuguese-speaking African doctoral students on behalf of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa).
Jean-Bernard Ouédraogo
Jean-Bernard Ouédraogo is a sociologist from Burkina Faso. He is Research Director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Professor of Sociology at EHESS in Paris, France. He is a member of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Contemporary Anthropology (LAIOS-IIAC, EHESS/CNRS) and former Deputy Executive Secretary of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa). He is the author of several articles and books in the field of arts Kalidou Kassé, peintures: Expériences de la forme (2014), Identité visuelle en Afrique (2008), Arts photographiques en Afrique (2002). He also edited Norbert Elias, Ecrits sur l'art africain (2002). Other books are (with Carlos Cardoso) Readings in Methodology. African Perspectives (2011), Colonialism and Violence: Formation de la classe ouvrière en Afrique noire (1989), Violences et communautés en Afrique noire (1997). He edited (with Mamadou Diawara Elisio Macamo) in 2018, Translation: Disputing the Sense of African Social Realities; 2019 (with Katrin Langewiesche) L'enquête et ses graphies en sciences sociales. Figurations iconographiques d'après société. Forthcoming books are (with Mamadou Diawara, Mamadou Diouf) Africa N'Ko: Africa in the World. Debating the African Colonial Library and (with Armelle Lefebvre) Invention des formes à l’ère de la globalisation. He is founder and editor of the journal Method(e): African Review of Social Science Methodology, published by ibidem-Verlag.
Rachel Spronk
Rachel Spronk is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She works at the intersection of three scholarly fields: anthropology, gender & sexuality studies, and African studies. In her publications, she analyses the complexities of gender, sexuality and culture by focussing on public debates on the one hand, and personal relationships and self-perceptions on the other. She studies the development of the (idea of the) middle classes in Kenya and Ghana and how those social transformations relate to changes in gender and sexuality. In her work, she combines the ethnographic study of practices and self-perceptions with the task of rethinking our theoretical repertoires. She is the author of Ambiguous Pleasures. Sexuality and Self-Perceptions in Nairobi (2012) and co-editor of Readings in Sexualities from Africa. (Readings in African Studies).