KATARZYNA (Kasia) GRABSKA – is a social anthropologist and a senior lecturer at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University in the Hague, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on gender, generation, youth, displacement, refuges, return, and identities, access to rights for refugees in urban settings. She has researched on
displacement and forced migration issues in Egypt, Kenya, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan,
and Vietnam. Kasia works with visual media, art-based research, feminist methodologies, and participatory methodologies. Since 2002, she has been carrying out a longitudinal study of gender relation transformations among Nuer from South Sudan in Egypt, Kenya, South Sudan and in Sudan, Khartoum. Her most recent research focuses on adolescent refugee girls’ experiences in Sudan, and on refugees’ involvement in civic change and hosting refugees in Sudan and in Switzerland. She collaborates often with artists in her research, and engages with art-based research to understand issues of belonging, displacement, mobilities and identities. She also is a film-maker. In 2016, in collaboration with a team of researchers and filmmakers, she produced a film based on her collaborative research project Time to look at girls: migrants in Ethiopia and Bangladesh. The long version of the film, 2 Girls, has been shown at over 30 film festivals and awarded 10 first prizes. She is also the writer, producer and co-director of the film Barbara Harrell-Bond: a life not ordinary (2018). She has published extensively on issues of gender relations and displacement. Kasia is the author of Gender, Identity and Home: Nuer repatriation to South Sudan (2014) which received the Armory Talbot Prize in 2015, co-editor of Forced Migration: Why Rights Matter? (2008), and a co-writer of Adolescent Girls’ Migration in the Global South: Transitions into Adulthood (2019).
RIJK VAN DIJK is a Professor in the study of religion in contemporary Africa and its Diaspora at the African Studies Centre, Leiden University. He is the former Editor-in-chief of the Brill-published journal ‘African Diaspora’. He coedited The Quest for Fruition through Ngoma (2000), with R. Reis and M. Spierenburg; The Social Life of Connectivity in Africa (2012), with M. de Bruijn; and Religion and aids Treatment in Africa (2014), with H. Dilger, M. Burchardt, and Th. Rasing. His current research is on Pentecostalism, consumerism, and marriage in Botswana, on which he recently published; “The Tent versus Lobola : Marriage, Monetary Intimacies and the New Face of Responsibility in Botswana”, Anthropology Southern Africa 2017, 40 (1): 29-41.