Payal Arora is the author of several books including Dot Com Mantra: Social Computing in the Central Himalayas (Ashgate, 2010) and The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2014; Winner of the EUR Fellowship Award) as well as co-author of The Shape of Diversity to Come: Crossroads in New media, Identity & Law (in press; Palgrave) and Poor@Play: Digital Life beyond the West (expected 2016; Harvard University Press). Her paper on digitization of information won the 2010 Best Paper Award in Social Informatics by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Her focus and expertise lies in the anthropology and sociology of new technologies, specifically their digital cultures and social activism. She has consulted for both the private and public sector worldwide including with Shell, World Bank, hp, National Health Foundation, The Ministry of Education in Jordan, Sotheby’s, Art Review, Kellogg and the Beirut Chambers of Commerce. She is currently a GE Fellow on the Industrial Internet Project. She sits on several boards including the Global Media Journal, The South Asian Media, Arts & Culture Research Center in University of North Texas, Young Erasmus, Makerocity, and The World Women Global Council in New York. She holds degrees from Harvard University (M.Ed., International Policy) and Columbia University (PhD, Language, Literacy & Technology). She is currently based in the Department of Media and Communication, Faculty of History, Culture and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. For more detail, please check her website: www.payalarora.com
Carolyn Chen is associate professor of sociology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton 2008) and co-editor of the book Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Religion, and Ethnicity among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (NYU 2012). She has written in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times about Asian Americans and college admissions. She is currently writing a book called Zen and the Art of Corporate Productivity about the culture of Asian spirituality in Silicon Valley companies.
Jason Keith Fernandes is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for International Studies (CIE) at ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon. Subsequent to a degree in law and a Master’s degree in the sociology of law, Jason was recently awarded a doctorate in anthropology for a dissertation on The Citizenship Experiences of Goan Catholics. With a Fellowship from the New India Foundation, he is in the process of writing a book manuscript around language and politics in post-colonial Goa.
Dr. Jenny Chio is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, USA, where she teaches courses on contemporary China, visual anthropology, critical tourism studies, and the anthropology of media. She completed her Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has recently published a monograph, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China (University of Washington Press, 2014), and directed an ethnographic film on tourism in two ethnic villages in China, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness (distributed by Berkeley Media, 2013).
Dr Shakuntala Banaji is a Lecturer in Media and Communications and Programme Director for the Masters in Media, Communication and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has 21 years’ experience as a teacher and educational researcher, currently lecturing in Film Theory, World Cinema, International Media, Communication and Development. Shakuntala has been part of several large-scale research projects for the European Union and other funders; among these ‘Young people and democratic participation in the European Union’ for EACEA through LSE Enterprise (2010-2012); ‘Stakeholder Perspectives on Creativity and Innovation in Schooling in the EU27’ (IPTS 2009-2010) and CivicWeb: Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation (EU, Framework 6, 2006-2009). Her unfunded research with young people in South Asia in relation to media, representation, citizenship and technology use is on-going. Shakuntala has published widely on Cinema Audiences, Bollywood, Youth, Gender, Ethnicity, Politics, Creativity and Online Civic Participation. Recent books include South Asian Media Cultures: Audiences, Representations, Contexts (2010) from Anthem Press and The Civic Web: Young People, Civic Participation and the Internet in Europe, (2013) co-authored with David Buckingham.
Jacob Copeman is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University. His publications include:
Social Theory After Strathern. Sage 2014; The Guru in South Asia: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives (co-edited with Aya Ikegame). 2012. Routledge; The Art of Bleeding: memory, martyrdom, and portraits in blood. 2013. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, S 149-S 171.; The Didactic Death: Publicity, Instruction and Body Donation. 2012. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 2(2) (co-authored with Deepa Reddy).
Michael Bergunder is Professor of Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology at the University of Heidelberg. His fields of interest include South India, Esotericism and Pentecostalism.
Stine Simonsen Puri is an anthropologist working as a postdoc at Institute for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at Copenhagen University, from where she also received her PhD. Her dissertation was on gambling and speculative economy in India based on fieldwork at indian racecourses. In addition to this, she has worked and published on dance, performance and mythology in India.
After completing her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh in 2007 (a historical anthropological study of the South Indian kingdom of Mysore) Dr Aya Ikegame won an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship (2007-8). She was then employed as a postdoctoral research fellow on an AHRC/ESRC project on monastery-run schools in South India (2009-10) at Edinburgh University’s Centre for South Asian Studies. She also worked (2010-11) as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary India Area Studies in the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan. She joined the OECUMENE Project in 2011.
Professor Chris Fuller specialises in India. His first fieldwork (1971-2) was in Kerala in southwest India among the Nayars and the Syrian Christians, and his work particularly focused on kinship among the Nayars, famous for their matriliny. From 2003-5, with other colleagues in LSE, Fuller worked on a major research project, sponsored by ESRC, on regionalism, nationalism and globalisation in India, and his research has focused on middle-class company managers and software professionals in the city of Chennai (Madras). From 2005-8, with Haripriya Narasimhan, he carried out an ESRC-sponsored research project on a group of Tamil Brahmans, focusing on this traditional elite‘s modern transformation into a migratory, urbanised, trans-national community. Their book based on this research, Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste, will be published in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press and Social Science Press (New Delhi). Fuller has also researched and written extensively on popular Hinduism and Hindu nationalism, the caste system, the anthropology of the state and other topics. His current research is on the history of the anthropology of India.
James Laidlaw teaches at the University of Cambridge where he is a Fellow of King‘s College and currently Head of the Social Anthropology Division. He has conducted fieldwork on Jainism in India and on Buddhism in Bhutan, Inner Mongolia, and currently in Taiwan.
Dr. Goldie Osuri is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology. She holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. Prior to her appointment at Warwick, she worked at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She has recently published a monograph, Religious Freedom in India: Sovereignty and (Anti) Conversion (Routledge, 2013).
Professor Kenneth Dean is James McGill Professor and Drs. Richard Charles and Esther Yewpick Lee Chair of Chinese Cultural Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies of McGill University. He is currently Visiting Research Professor in the Asia Research Institute and the Department of Chinese Studies of NUS.
Hans Steinmüller is a specialist in the anthropology of China working at the London School of Economics. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in the Enshi region of Hubei Province in central China, focusing on family, work, ritual, and the local state. The main object of his research are the ethics of everyday life in rural China, but he has also written on topics such as gambling, rural development, and Chinese geomancy (fengshui). At LSE, he is the convenor of the MSc programme ‚China in Comparative Perspective‘.
Charles Stafford is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is a specialist in the anthropology of learning and cognition, and has carried out fieldwork for many years in rural Taiwan, China and (more recently) America. He is the author of „Separation and reunion in modern China“ and the editor of „Ordinary ethics in China“. He is also the publisher and editor of the online review journal Anthropology of this Century (AOTC).
G. Arunima (Arunima Gopinath) is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at JNU, Delhi and currently a Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, University of Kölln. She is the author of ‘There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar c. 1850-1940 (2003) and numerous articles and book chapters. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Novel Images: Aesthetics, Culture, and Modernity in Colonial South India, Kerala 1870-1940. Professor Gopinath’s research projects include: “Sacred Geographies, Hybrid Iconographies: Faith Practices and Idioms of Malayali Religious Iconography” and “Gender, Photography and Visual Practices in Contemporary India.”