Giovanni da Col is Director of the newly founded Centre for Ethnographic Theory at SOAS, University of London, and member of the ERC-KHAM project at CNRS-Centre d’Etudes Himalayennes. He has done fieldwork on conceptions of vitality, witchcraft and modes of deception in China’s official Shangri-la, and is currently conducting research on self-immolations among Tibetans in PRC and Naxi-Tibetan rituals of life and prosperity. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of HAU, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Executive Publisher of HAU Books, the author of several peer-reviewed articles, and editor of a few collections, including three volumes on hospitality and fortune (2012 JRAI, Social Analysis-Berghahn). Some overdue collections and monographs are forthcoming in 2016: The Invisible State: Spirits and Environmental Worlds on China’s Frontiers (The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology-Routledge), Cosmoeconomics: Theorising vitality, prosperity and alternative economies today (Anthropological Theory); and Anthropology and Life Itself (with Bhrigupati Singh, Clara Han and Bob Desjarlais, 2016). He is currently working on an invited article on Hospitality for the Annual Review of Anthropology and the entries ‘Life’, ‘Luck, Fortune and Chance’ and ‘Event’ for Wiley-Blackwell’s International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (in preparation) His monograph on negative kinship, poisoning and hospitality in Tibetan borderlands is under consideration at the University of Chicago Press.
Nadia Fadil works as an Assistant Professor at the Interculturalism, Migration and Multiculturalism Research Centre at the KU Leuven. Her research interests revolve around the questions of secularism and religion, subjectivity, embodiment and affect and Islam as a discursive tradition. These questions are explored through an ethnographic engagement with the public debates around, and the lived experiences of, secular and pious Muslims in Brussels and Francophone Europe. Parts of her work have been published in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, and some of her most recent publications include “Recalling the Islam of the Parents. Politics of authentication of liberal and secular Muslims” (2015, published in Identities. Global Studies in Culture and Power) and “Rediscovering the Everyday Muslim: Notes on an Anthropological Fault-line” (2015, co-authored with Mayanthi Fernando and published in HAU. Journal of Ethnographic Theory).
Patrick holds a PhD in law from the University of Cologne and an LLM from Columbia University School of Law. He is currently affiliated with the Hamburg Foundation for the promotion of Science and Culture, working on a research project on transitional justice and hybrid normative orders in the Democratic Republic of congo and the wider Great Lakes region of Africa.
Since October, 2013 Samuel has been enrolled in a PhD programme in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Goettingen, under Professor Roman Loimeier. He is looking at the consequences of spatial competitions of the Datoga pastoral communities in Central and North Tanzania, from the late 19th to the first decades of the twenty first century.
Dr. Esra Özyürek is an Associate Professor and Chair for Contemporary Turkish Studies at the European Institute, London School of Economics. She received her BA in Sociology and Political Science at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and her MA and PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before joining the LSE she taught at the Anthropology Department of University of California, San Diego. Her most recent book Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion and Conversion in the New Europe has been published by the Princeton University Press (2014).
Sabine Mohamed is a Doctoral Candidate at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity pursuing her PhD at the Anthropology Department at the Ruprecht Karls University in Heidelberg. Her project examines the creation of a pluralist state founded upon ethnic diversity, from the viewpoint of the urban regional hub of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia).