Steven Van Wolputte is professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa (IARA), KU Leuven. He has published in the fields of material and popular culture, political anthropology and of the anthropology of the body. Besides the impact of rapid urbanization on intimacy and close relationships, his current research interests include the anthropology of human security in Africa and a research project on how makerspaces imagine and make the African city of the future. For more information: see https://www.kuleuven.be/wieiswie/en/person/00017725
Ann Heirman, Ph.D. (1998) in Oriental Languages and Cultures, is professor of Chinese Language and Culture and head of the Centre for Buddhist Studies at Ghent University in Belgium. She has published extensively on Chinese Buddhist monasticism and the development of disciplinary rules, including Rules for Nuns according to the Dharmaguptakavinaya (Motilal Banarsidass, 2002), The Spread of Buddhism (Brill, edited volume with Stephan Peter Bumbacher, 2007), A Pure Mind in a Clean Body (with Mathieu Torck, Academia Press, 2012), and Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia (Brill, edited volume with Carmen Meinert and Christoph Anderl, 2018).
Teresa de Jesús Fernández was teacher at the Faculties of Arts and Philosophy and Foreign Languages and Literatures, of the University of Sassari, Sardinia. She is now a leading activist of the LGTBI community, and currently works as an external collaborator of Cenesex, as National Coordinator of the network of lesbian and bisexual women of this institution. In 1986 she won the David Essay Prize, UNEAC. In 2019 she translated the book “Femminielli. Corpo, Genere, Cultura” from Eugenio Zito and Paolo Valerio, as well as a book of interviews with lesbian and bisexual women from different regions of Cuba (coordinated by Sara Más and Teresa de Jesús Fernández), which is the first book to be published in Cuba on the subject.
Link: http://directoriogenero.redsemlac-cuba.net/teresa-de-jesus-fernandez-gonzalezla-habana-1960/
Katrien Pype is an anthropologist who has been working on Kinshasa’s media and technology cultures since 2003. She has published in journals such as Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology; Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society; Visual Anthropology; and Media, Culture & Society. Her monograph, The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama: Religion, Media, and Gender in Kinshasa, was published in 2012; she also co-edited a volume on Ageing in Sub-Saharan Africa: Spaces and Practices of Care (Bristol University Press). Katrien also co-initiated the CongoResearchNetwork. She is associate professor in anthropology at the KU Leuven.
Sigrid Vertommen is a FWO postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies of Ghent University and an affiliated member of the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender. She was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London (2017-2019), and a research associate at the Sociology of Reproduction Research Group (ReproSoc) at the University of Cambridge (2019).