Lisa Brown is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the School of Anthropology, Gender and Historical Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She is the author of several articles including ‘Invisible Maids: Slavery and soap operas in Northeast Brazil’ in Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity; ‘The Joy of Suffering: Nietzsche, theodicy and women’s bodies’ in South African Journal of Philosophy’. She is currently working focusing on virginity testing in Brazil and South Africa.

Her areas of interest include, gender, ethnicity, religion (Islam and indigenous African religions), women's organisations, male and female initiations and circumcision/excision, human rights.

Nolwazi Mkhwanazi is a senior researcher at the Fort Hare Institute ofocial and Economic Research. She received her Ph.D in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. In 2005 and 2006 she was the Andrew Mellon post-doctoral research fellow in the department of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town.  Nolwazi's research interests are in the field of youth, gender and reproductive health. Her previous work has been on teenage pregnancy.

Ann Schlyter is associate professor and director of the Centre for Global Gender Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has conducted researched mostly in Zambia and she has published widely in her areas of specialisation which include gender, generation, housing and urban development. She was a scientific advisor in the GRUPHEL programme 1992- 2005 involving gender research cooperation in Southern Africa with focus on urbanisation, planning, housing, and everyday life.

Paula Mählck finished her PhD thesis (Mapping Gender in Academic Workplaces: Ways of reproducing Gender inequality within the discourse of equality) at the department of Sociology, Umeå University in 2003. Since then she has expanded her research to studying intersections of gender and race relations and processes of inclusion and exclusion in higher education. In 2005 she had an opportunity to spend a lengthy time at African Gender Institute (AGI), University of Cape Town, South Africa which resulted in research collaboration with South African scholars focusing on gender equality and diversity practices in Swedish and South African higher education.

Matšeliso Ma-Tlali Mapetla holds a Masters Degree in Public Administration, and a Graduate Diploma in Public Administration both of which she obtained from Carlton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is currently the Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Southern African Studies at the National University of Lesotho and former Director of the of the Institute (ISAS).  Mrs Mapetla is the Coordinator of Gender and Development Research Programme at the same Institute and she is an experienced researcher and has widely published in her areas of interest including women and gender issues across different disciplines, organizational and institutional development, politics, and governance and administration. She has directed/coordinated the regional Network on Gender Research on Urbanisation Planning Housing and Every Day (GRUPHEL) Programme and been a Scientific Advisor for thirteen years. She has conducted research and published a few books and articles under this programme.

Department of Psychology

Social Sciences Building

Umeå University

Karin Sporre is Associate Professor in Educational work with a focus on values, gender and diversity at Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden. Trained in ethics her research the last few years has dealt with diversity and knowledge in multicultural societies, as well as issues of democracy and human rights – all in relation to education. She has devoted quite some time since the year 2000 to research cooperation and exchange between South Africa and Sweden. In research and other aspects of her academic work feminist theory has proved a most valuable resource when dealing with such diverse issues as citizenship education, epistemology and feminist ethics.

Anne-Maria Makhulu is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University.  She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2003.  Her research interests cover the following geographic and conceptual areas, broadly defined: Africa and more specifically South Africa, cities, space, globalization, political economy, occult economies, neoliberalism, Marxism, anthropology of finance, as well as questions of aesthetics, including the literature and cinema of South Africa.She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled The Geography of Freedom: Revolution and the South African City.  The project examines the status and meaning of the South African city under apartheid and immediately after the transition to democracy.  Makhulu is a contributor to Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age (2004), and Politics, Publics, Personhood: New Ethnographies at the Limits of Neoliberalism (under review at the University of Pennsylvania Press).  She is a co-editor of Creativity beyond Crisis: Perspectives on the Politics of Agency in Africa, currently under review with the University of California Press and a contributor to a forthcoming special issue of Social Text honoring the work of Jean Comaroff.

Antonádia Borges is PhD in Anthropology teaching at University of Brasilia. She is also researcher of the Brazilian National Council of Research (CNPq). The investigations she deals with are focused on contemporary anthropology and the building of an ethnographic theory.

The field of her research spreads to situations where and when the daily presence of the State is experienced, focusing the distribution of governmental benefits and assets. The main source of inspiration to the current problems of her investigations comes from South Africa (concerning the struggles and the meaning of land restitution policies in the post-apartheid era) and Brazil (regarding political transformations that take place in the satellites-towns around Brasilia). Among others, she has published: Mats, blankets, songs and flags: ethnography of the politics of funeral in contemporary South Africa.

Margareta Espling is working as senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of Human and Economic Geography, University of Gothenburg. She has been working with courses in Development Studies and Human Geography for twenty years.

In the early 1990s  Margareta  worked in Mozambique for two years as a researcher in the Women and Law in Southern Africa (WLSA) Research Project at the Centre for African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University. During the mid-1990s she carried out my PhD research on women’s everyday lives and livelihoods in some urban areas in Mozambique, a theme she  has now returned to hoping to trace the same women to follow their livelihood trajectories.

At present half of Margareta’s time is devoted to two institutional collaboration programmes on PhD training, with the Faculty of Social Sciences, Makerere University, Uganda and with the Geography Department, National University of Rwanda. In Makerere she works with the Dept. for Women and Gender Studies. Under the title “Public Policy and Changing Gender Relations in Uganda” research is being carried out focusing on women’s community based groups and Affirmative Action for women in the Local Councils.

Patience Mususa is a Wadsworth African Fellow currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Cape Town, Department of Social Anthropology. Her research looks at former miner’s experience of housing on the Zambian Copperbelt after they lost their job during the privatization of the mines, but gained a house as part of their terminal benefits. She has a background in architecture in which she has worked in practice in Zambia and lectured at the Copperbelt University. On a Rhodes scholarship she pursued a masters of science in ‘Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography’ from Oxford University where she explored the aesthetic experience of architects in post colonial Zambia and in ‘Development Practice’ from Oxford Brookes University where she evaluated child social policy with a focus on housing in Zambia.

Lucy Kondwani Chipeta is a lecturer in human geography in the department of Geography and Earth Sciences at chancellor College, University of Malawi. She has widely published in the area of urban planning and gender. Her main interests are in gender and generation issues, urban planning and development, housing, environment including EIA.  She holds a Masters degree in Civic Design (town and regional Planning) from University of Malawi.

Mulela Margaret Munalula is an active researcher in issues of gender equality, discrimination and the Law. She has worked in development banking, as a magistrate and finally as a law teacher.  After attaining her Master’s degree in 1989, Dr Munalula began teaching full-time. Much of her teaching life has been spent at the University of Zambia where she remains to date.  In July 2007 she was elected Dean of the School of Law becoming the first woman to hold the position. As a member of both Women and Law in Southern Africa (WLSA) and Gender in Urbanisation, Planning, Housing and Everyday Life (GRUPHEL) regional research networks, Dr Munalula has also been exposed to multidisciplinary research nationally and regionally.    Her recent publications include “Women, Gender Discrimination and the Law”, a Cases and Materials’ text on gender law; a Zambia Law Journal article entitled “Dilemmas of dual justice paradigms: gender inequality in the Zambian courts”; and “Changing the Customary Law Standard of gender Justice: The Additional Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa”, a chapter in a book.

Hauwa Mahdi obtained her Bachelors and Masters Degrees at the Department of History, Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. From 1980 to 1990 she taught at the Centre for Nigerian Cultural Studies and at the Department of History, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. She obtained her PhD at the Department of History, Gothenburg University (GU) Sweden in 2006. She has been teaching African history at the Centre for African Studies, GU since 2000. Both her Masters and PhD thesis are about gender/women in Nigeria. She is currently a researcher at the Centre of Global Gender Studies, GU and a member of the coordinating team for a Swedish gender researchers’ network called GADNET.