Contributors

Lara Braff is an anthropology professor at Grossmont College, where she teaches cultural and biological anthropology courses and serves as a co-coordinator for the college’s Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) initiative. She is a coeditor of Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology, a free, open access textbook. She received her BA in anthropology and Spanish from the University of California at Berkeley and her MA and PhD in comparative human development from the University of Chicago, where she specialized in medical anthropology. Her research has focused on the cultural nuances and social disparities that shape family-making and assisted reproduction in Mexico City.

Silvia Carrasco, PhD, is professor of social anthropology in the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona (UAB). Founder of the Centre of Research on Migrations, her research focuses on school experiences and trajectories of migrant, refugee and working-class students, education policy, and social inequality. She is currently working on two lines of research: early school leaving and social integration among working-class and second-generation students, as well as the penetration of neoliberal ideologies in education and their impact on coeducation from a feminist approach. A specialist in school ethnography, she has conducted fieldwork in Europe and the United States. Her teaching activities include research methods and anthropology applied to public policy.

Alba Castellsagué, PhD, is an educator and social anthropologist at the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona (UAB). Her research focuses on gender, education, and development, particularly on the intersectional analysis of educational inequalities in Nepal. She has also collaborated on research about mobility and education in Spain and intersectionality and equality policies in Spanish higher education institutions.

Serena Cosgrove is an assistant professor of international studies at Seattle University. She is the director of the Latin American studies program and also coordinates Seattle University’s Central America Initiative. She is the coauthor of Surviving the Americas: Garifuna Persistence from Nicaragua to New York City (2021) and author of Leadership from the Margins: Women and Civil Society Organizations in Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador (2010), among other publications.

Nathan Dawthorne is a queer sociocultural anthropologist and advocate whose research background includes male sex work, sexuality and gender politics, and social determinants of health. He obtained his PhD in anthropology from the University of Western Ontario. Nathan is a caregiver advisor for research at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto (Canada) and former research associate with the Franz Boas Papers Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration reassessing and recontextualizing early American anthropology.

Dannah Dennis is a political and cultural anthropologist. She completed her PhD at the University of Virginia in 2017 and is currently a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Bucknell University. In addition to her research on citizenship, she has published work on the politics of infrastructure in Kathmandu, Nepal’s claim to Buddha’s birthplace and its circulation on social media, the history of visual representation of Nepal’s first Shah king, and the obligations of care and gift-giving in transnational families. You can find her on Twitter @dannahdennis.

Holly Dygert is a lecturer of anthropology at Tufts University. She received her BA in music performance from Hartwick College, and her MA and PhD in anthropology from Michigan State University. Her areas of expertise include gender and development, income transfer programs, Indigenous cultural politics, and community health initiatives. Her research has primarily focused on the experiences of Ñuu Savi (Mixtec) villagers living in the Mixteca Alta region of southern Mexico.

Nadine T. Fernandez is a cultural anthropologist and professor in the Social Science and Public Affairs Department at SUNY Empire State College. She has a BA in urban studies and history from the University of Pennsylvania, and a master’s and PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. She has over twenty years of experience teaching traditional and nontraditional students in the classroom and online and is committed to creating and using Open Educational Resources (OERs). Her research examines race and gender relations in Cuba and Cuban migration to Europe. In 2015 she received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Her publications include: Revolutionizing Romance: Interracial Couples in Contemporary Cuba (2010); an edited book (with Christian Groes) Intimate Mobilities: Sexual Economies, Marriage and Migration in a Disparate World (2018); and several book chapters and journal articles.

Ina Goel is the founder of award-winning digital platform, The Hijra Project. She has a BA in journalism and an MA in social work from the University of Delhi in India. She completed her MPhil in social medicine and community health from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Ina has worked with All India Radio and Al Jazeera English. She was a recipient of a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship at the department of epidemiology and international public health at Bielefeld University and the INLAKS scholarship at the department of gender and sexuality studies at University College London. Ina has also worked with FHI 360, UNICEF, the National AIDS Control Organization in India, the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, and the humanitarian organization Plan International. She is currently an HKPFS doctoral candidate at the Department of Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong and a visiting fellow at Anthropos India Foundation.

Hemangini Gupta is a visiting assistant professor in gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Middlebury College. She has a PhD in women’s gender and sexuality studies from Emory University, and her writing has been published in Feminist Review, Feminist Media Studies, the Journal of International Women’s Studies, and in the edited anthology Gender: Love. Prior to her PhD, she was a national print and TV journalist in India and currently curates public humanities exhibits to expand the reach of academic research.

Heidi Härkönen is a social and cultural anthropologist currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. She earned her doctorate at the University of Helsinki in 2014 and has been a visiting researcher at the City University of New York, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Cambridge. She has been conducting ethnographic research in Cuba since 2003 and is the author of Kinship, Love and Life Cycle in Contemporary Havana, Cuba: To Not Die Alone (2016). Her research interests include gender, kinship, body, personhood, care, love, life course, digitalization, politics, the state, socialism, and postsocialism.

Ashley Kistler is a professor of anthropology at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. She is an ethnographer and linguist who has conducted fieldwork in Maya communities in Mexico and Guatemala. Dr. Kistler’s research focuses on globalization and contemporary Maya culture, collaborative ethnography, ethnohistory, and revitalization movements. Dr. Kistler has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles, published in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Anthropology and Humanism, and The Latin Americanist, among other journals. She is the author of Maya Market Women: Power and Tradition in San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala (2014) and editor of, Faces of Resistance: Maya Heroes, Power, and Identity (2018). At Rollins, Dr. Kistler teaches courses on the Maya, Latin American studies, ethnographic theory and methods, and linguistic anthropology.

Lynn Kwiatkowski is a professor of cultural anthropology at Colorado State University. Her research interests include gender violence, medical anthropology, global health, critical studies of development, and hunger in Vietnam and the Philippines. Her current research focuses on gender violence and the social and cultural influences on such violence, its impacts on health and well-being, and the effects of global movements against violence toward women in local communities in northern Vietnam. She has also had a special focus on investigating marital sexual violence in these communities, analyzing its particular sociocultural influences and impacts and the cultural interpretations of this form of domestic violence. She is the author of Struggling with Development: The Politics of Hunger and Gender in the Philippines (1998), which is based on her research in Ifugao Province, the Philippines. Dr. Kwiatkowski has served as secretary and executive board member of the Association for Feminist Anthropology (AFA) (2011–2014).

Abha Lal completed her bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology from Swarthmore College in 2018. She is working as a journalist at The Record, a Nepali digital media outlet, covering human rights, politics, and development.

Elizabeth Pérez Márquez holds a PhD in social anthropology from the Center for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Guadalajara, Mexico. Dr. Pérez Márquez is a professor at University of Guadalajara at Department of Cultural Management. Her work explores, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the diversity of fatherhood, contemporary Indigenous practices, and identities in transnational migration in Mexico and the United States.

Melanie A. Medeiros is an associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Her research examines the experiences of cisgender Black women in the Americas, and Latinx im/migrant farmworkers in Western/Central New York. As a cisgender woman with US and Portuguese citizenship who identifies as a white person, Melanie is committed to using her multiple levels of privilege to address health inequity through both her research and teaching. She is the author of Marriage, Divorce and Distress in Northeast Brazil: Black Women’s Perspectives of Love, Respect and Kinship.

Elsa Mescoli is an anthropologist affiliated with the Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies (CEDEM) at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Liege, where she is working as lecturer assistant and postdoctoral researcher. She obtained a joint doctorate in anthropology at the University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy, and political and social sciences at the University of Liege, Belgium. Her thesis focused on food as a means of defining subjectivity in the context of migration. Mescoli’s present research interests include the discrimination of Muslims and public opinion on migrants, with a focus on asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented migrants. The list of her publications and presentations is available at http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/simple-search?query=mescoli.

Natasha Kay Mortley has a bachelor’s in sociology and MPhil in sociology of development from the University of the West Indies (UWI), Trinidad, and a PhD in migration and development studies from the UWI, Jamaica. Dr. Mortley is currently a lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Regional Coordinating Office, at the UWI, Jamaica. She has extensive experience in the field of development studies, and over the past fifteen years she has been dedicated to integrating a gender perspective to Caribbean social development and policy issues. She therefore considers herself a social developmentalist working in the area of gender and development studies, as well as an advocate for gender equality, social justice, and female empowerment. Her recent research work includes Caribbean masculinities. In 2017 Dr. Mortley conducted a study on “males, masculinities and crime in Jamaica,” and in 2019 completed a “masculinities and positive fathering” study also for Jamaica.

Nolwazi Nadia Ncube is a Zimbabwean PhD student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the Department of Sociology. She is a Research Fellow for a research project funded by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF), The Rand and the Reproductive Body: Markets for Reproduction in South Africa, and its extension Global Fertility Markets: New Reproduction and (Old) Stratifications. In 2018, Nolwazi was awarded the Margaret McNamara Education Grant (MMEG) for her work with Save the Girl Movement promoting sanitary dignity for indigent girls in Zimbabwe. She is also a 2021 Summer Research Fellow for the Black Girls Matter project at the African American Policy Forum (AAPF). Nolwazi is passionate about theory of Africa produced by African scholars. She believes that African languages are a rich archive for social scientific theorization. Her main research interests are Black girlhoods, development, gender, sociology and southern Africa.

Katie Nelson is instructor of anthropology at Inver Hills Community College. Her research focuses on migration, identity, belonging, and citizenship(s) in human history and in the contemporary United States, Mexico, and Morocco. She received a BA in anthropology and Latin American studies from Macalester College, an MA in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an MA in education and instructional technology from the University of Saint Thomas, and a PhD from CIESAS Occidente (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social Center for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology), based in Guadalajara, Mexico. She is Associate Editor for the Teaching and Learning Anthropology Journal. Her publications include Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology, an edited textbook with Shook, Braff and Aguilera (American Anthropological Association, 2019), Doing Field Projects: Methods and Practice for Social and Anthropological Research, with John Forrest (forthcoming) and several other book chapters and journal articles.

Sarah Quick is an associate professor of anthropology at Cottey College in Missouri, where she teaches cultural anthropology courses, qualitative research methods, interdisciplinary courses overlapping with environmental studies, and Cottey’s first semester writing course. Dr. Quick is trained in sociocultural anthropology and ethnomusicology, and it was through her doctoral field research on Indigenous fiddle dance performance in Western Canada that she met Kathleen Steinhauer. Her research interests span from contemporary Indigenous music and dance performance to farm-oriented youth groups and food movements.

Keino T. Senior is the dean of the School of Arts Management and Humanities (SAMH) and the Gender Focal Point at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts (EMCVPA) in Jamaica. He is chairperson and coeditor of the Jonkonnu Arts Journal, and founder and chair of the Annual Gender and Development Lecture. Dr. Senior received his PhD (with high commendation) in gender and development studies from the University of the West Indies (UWI) in the area of masculinities, fatherhood, and abortion. His scholarly research and publications focus on masculinities, fatherhood, culture, the arts, men against violence, climate change and disaster risk management, sexual and reproductive health rights, and sexuality. He is currently engaged in a research project on masculinity and fathering and lectures in Caribbean sexualities at the Regional Office of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies.

Susan W. Tratner earned a master’s in Latin American studies and a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Florida. She has completed anthropological field research on gay men in San Jose, Costa Rica, investigated the impact of free trade zones on domestic servants in the Dominican Republic, and studied variations in business culture and corporate communication in Monterrey, Mexico. Professor Tratner worked as a market research ethnographer and moderator for Fortune 500 and start-up companies. Her research focus has been anonymous online communities since 2006. Prof. Tratner coedited the book EFieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology in the Digital World (2015) with Roger Sanjek. Currently, she holds the rank of full professor at SUNY Empire State College in the Business, International Business, and Marketing Department.

Ana Marina Tzul Tzul is a medical doctor with a master’s in public health. She is the head of the College of Health and Nursing at the Universidad Rafael Landívar’s Quetzaltenango Campus in Guatemala.

Emily Wentzell is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa, where she also directs the school’s international studies program. Her research focuses on the relationships between changing gender norms and emerging sexual health interventions targeted at men and draws on ideas from medical anthropology, gender/sexuality studies, and science and technology studies.