Koen de Munter (1960) studied Roman Philology (Ma) and Comparative Science of Cultures (Ma, PhD) at UGent. As an anthropologist he has been working since the nineties in the Andean region, mostly in the Bolivian Altiplano, with Aymara families who commute between the indigenous city of El Alto and their home communities. Academically he has been employed in different universities in Chile, since 2012 he holds an appointment at the Department of Anthropology at Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Santiago de Chile). From the study of intercultural and postcolonial dynamics in the Andean region he has evolved in recent years towards a much more ‘biosocial’ (socialecological) perspective, focusing the theoretical reflection on the relevance of Tim Ingold’s recent work about an anthropology of life an about an “education by attention”. Koen de Munter has been conducting longstanding research projects, amongst other things about “Vivir bien” praxis, politics and ideologies (2015-2019). He is currently the principal investigator of a project about “Aymara cosmpraxis in a relational world: “making family” with the living, the dead and the wak’as” (Chilean government funded Fondecyt Regular 1190279, 2019-2022).
Dr. Sara De Vuyst is a postdoctoralresearcher at the Department of Communication Studies at Ghent University. Her research interests are feminist media studies, and more specifically, gender issues andtechnological innovation journalism. She is currently working on a postdoc that explores online abuse of journalists from an intersectional perspective. Sara De Vuyst is vice-chair of the ECREA Gender and Communication section.
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).