Valeria Bonatti is a lecturer of Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a member of the ASEAN-China International Research Network, and of the Italian association Makran. Her research considers the role and experiences of migrant and disenfranchised labor forces in environmentalist practices in the European Union and in Southeast Asia. She has published in the European Journal of Women's Studies (2018), in Migration Studies (2018) in Capitalism Nature Socialism (2015) and in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, she has worked for Bard College and for the Bard Prison Initiative.
Waqas H. Butt is an assistant professor in the Anthropology department at University of Toronto Scarborough whose research focuses on the intersections of caste, infrastructures, labor, and development in urban Pakistan. His long-term ethnographic fieldwork, conducted in Lahore and other cities and towns in Pakistan's Punjab province, has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the University of California San Diego. More broadly, his work brings together a series of concerns—materiality and labor, uneven development and capitalism, and governance and technology—and unpacks the fraught socio-political processes by which unexpected possibilities for life are currently unfolding in cities across South Asia and globally.
Syantani Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on dispossession, embodiment, and waste in South Asia. Her dissertation project entitled “The New Gateway of India: Toxicity and Belonging in Contemporary Mumbai” examines how bodily and sensory experiences of toxicity, inequalities, and violence are routinized, and articulated in the form of desire and ethics, rather than injury and harm. Her research has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University.
Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. His research concerns the everyday life of infrastructures, the dynamics of urban transformation, and the constitution of political authority in African cities. He has conducted ethnographic research on the diverse worlds of waste in Kampala, Uganda, and is currently studying mobility, labor, and gender in the transport industry in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Zsuzsa Gille is Professor of Sociology and Director of Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud: The Politics of Materiality in the European Union (Indiana University Press, 2016), From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (Indiana University Press 2007—recipient of honorable mention of the AAASS Davis Prize), co-editor of Post-Communist Nostalgia with Maria Todorova (Berghahn Press, 2010), and co-author of Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (University of California Press, 2000). She was the special guest editor of Slavic Review's thematic cluster on Nature, Culture, Power (2009). She recently edited a critical debate forum on the pages of Slavic Review on the Eastern European response to the 2015 migration crisis.
Melanie Samson is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research focuses on the relationship between waste and value, and on how analysis of the work and lives of informal workers allows for the development of theorisations of the economy and polity more relevant to postcolonial contexts. She is currently investigating the politics and political economy of the ways government and industry seek to ‘integrate’ reclaimers. Melanie is also facilitating a national stakeholder process to develop National Guidelines on Waste Picker Integration for the South African Department of Environmental Affairs.
Marisa Solomon is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY). Her work uses Black Marxist feminist and queer of color theory, intersectionality, and standpoint epistemologies to ethnographically explore histories of space and place and the materiality, durability and violence of the geographies of racism. Marisa focuses on how racist logics of disposability construct environments and how working-class communities of color respond to their enforced proximities of trash and toxicity through politics, aesthetics and alternative futures.
Jennifer Tucker specializes in the study of technology, law, photography, environmental history, gender and culture focusing especially on the 19th/early 20th centuries. The author of Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science and numerous articles and book chapters, she recently completed a book manuscript about photography and facial likeness in the Victorian courtroom. Her current book projects include a study of photographic chemistry and the Victorian alkali industry. A member of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective and co-editor of the “Photography and History” series at Bloomsbury Academic Press, she is also co-editor of a forthcoming Photography and Law Reader, the editor of A Right to Bear Arms? The Contested Role of History in Contemporary Debates on the Second Amendment (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, forthcoming) and co-editor of a special issue on “Politics of Technoscience” for Radical History Review (Winter 2017).
