Barbara Adam, Professor Emerita (Cardiff University), is a social theorist who has applied the focus on time to the breadth of social science concerns – from education and environmental matters to transport and work – and has published extensively on the subject. The future featured mainly as the unresolved part of this agenda-setting work until an ESRC Professorial Fellowship enabled her to concentrate explicitly on this elusive subject. She is founder editor of the journal Time & Society.
Yoko Akama is Associate Professor in Communication Design, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Australia. Her research focuses on participatory design practices, and design artefacts, language and processes, and their role in enabling people to live in changing economic, cultural and environmental circumstances.
Catherine Ayres is a PhD candidate in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on the sometimes conflicting ways we conceptualize and experience ‘Nature’, specifically in the realm of national parks and other protected areas.
Harmony Bench is Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at Ohio State University. Her writing can be found in Dance Research Journal, The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Participations and The International Journal of Screendance, for which she currently serves as co-editor with Simon Ellis. She is working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Dance as Common: Movement as Belonging in Digital Cultures, as well as Mapping Touring, a digital humanities and database project focused on the performance engagements of early twentieth-century dance companies.
David Bissell is Senior Lecturer in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He combines qualitative research on embodied practices with social theory to explore the social, political and ethical consequences of mobile lives.
Monika Büscher is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, Director of the Centre for Mobilities Research and Associate Director at the Institute for Social Futures. Her research explores the digital dimension of contemporary ‘mobile lives’ with a focus on IT ethics and risk governance. She edits the book series Changing Mobilities (Routledge) with Peter Adey.
Jane Calvert is a Reader in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her current research focuses on attempts to engineer living things in the emerging field of synthetic biology. She is interested in interdisciplinary collaborations of all sorts.
Rebecca Coleman is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London, where she researches and teaches on visual and inventive methodologies, futures and presents, bodies and images. She is currently working on a multi-media book project titled Engaging Futures: Methods, Materials, Media (in preparation, Goldsmiths Press). She has recently published Deleuze and Research Methodologies (co-edited with Jessica Ringrose, 2013, Edinburgh University Press).
Alberto Corsín Jiménez is Reader in Social Anthropology in the Department of the History of Science at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid. He is the author of An Anthropological Trompe l’Oeil for a Common World (Berghahn, 2013) and editor of Prototyping Cultures: Art, Science and Politics in Beta (Routledge, 2016), Culture and Well-Being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics (Pluto, 2008) and The Anthropology of Organisations (Ashgate, 2007). His current work examines the rise of an urban commons movement and the development of open-source urban hardware projects by architects, artists and engineers.
Claire Craig worked as project administrator on the ERC-funded project, ‘The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa’, from 2013 to 2015. Her work included liaising between the teams in Nairobi and Lagos, ensuring the smooth running of reporting-back procedures, and managing the project blog. She holds an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and a Masters degree in Social Research Methods, both from the University of Sussex.
Gail Davies is Professor in Human Geography at the University of Exeter. Her work incorporates insights from geography, science and technology studies and anthropology to explore the spatiality of knowledge practices, biotechnology and emerging animal geographies. She is currently working on a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award, which is charting changing relationships across the ‘Animal Research Nexus’.
Leila Dawney is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Brighton, UK. As a theorist of power, affect and embodiment, her research concerns the forms of experience and subjectivity that are produced in and through spaces of late capitalism, and the development of conceptual and methodological tools for thinking about the politics of experience. She is a member of the Authority Research Network.
Carl DiSalvo is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech he directs the Public Design Workshop: a design research studio that explores socially engaged design and civic media. DiSalvo’s scholarship draws together theories and methods from design research and design studies, the social sciences and the humanities, to analyse the social and political qualities of design, and to prototype experimental systems and services. His first book, Adversarial Design (2012), is part of the Design Thinking, Design Theory series at MIT Press. He is also a co-editor of the MIT Press journal Design Issues. DiSalvo’s experimental design work has been exhibited and supported by the ZKM, Grey Area Foundation for the Arts, Times Square Arts Alliance, Science Gallery Dublin and the Walker Art Center.
Tuur Driesser is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, UK. His research examines how smart cities are made through digital maps and data visualizations, exploring different methods and methodologies for the study of, with and through maps.
Luciana Duranti is Professor of Archival Theory, Diplomatics, and the Management of Digital Records in the master’s and doctoral archival programmes of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies of the University of British Columbia (UBC). She is Director of the Centre for the International Study of Contemporary Records and Archives (CISCRA – www.ciscra.org) and of InterPARES, the largest and longest living publicly funded research project on the long-term preservation of authentic electronic records (1998–2019).
Catriona Elder is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. The focus of her scholarship is race relations and national identity, making contributions to the development of theory emerging in Critical Whiteness Studies in Australia. She is co-coordinator of a WUN International Indigenous Research Network where she works with Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars on issues related to Indigenous knowledges, intercultural research and ethics. She is also part of a team working on an Australian Research Council project (Telling it like it is) exploring the contemporary experiences of Aboriginal people in northern Australia.
Sasha Engelmann is a creative geographer exploring the poetics and politics of air. Over the past three years she has carried out site-based ethnographic fieldwork at Studio Tomás Saraceno in Berlin, especially related to Saraceno’s Aerocene project. She is currently Lecturer in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway University, London, and Director of Artists in Residence at the Centre for GeoHumanities. Sasha holds a DPhil in Geography and the Environment from the University of Oxford.
Rachel Fensham is a dance and theatre scholar, and is Professor and Assistant Dean of the Digital Studio, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne. In her field of dance and performance studies, her funded research includes a study of regional theatre and young adult audiences and a digital mapping project of performance venues. Recent publications include the edited volume Dancing Naturally: Nature, Neo-Classicism and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century Dance (Palgrave, 2011) and digital humanities case studies in Transmission in Motion (Routledge, 2016) and Digital Movement (Palgrave, 2015). With Peter M. Boenisch she co-edits the book series New World Choreographies (Palgrave).
Masato Fukushima is Professor of Social Anthropology and STS at the University of Tokyo, Japan. He has extensively published on issues such as religion and politics in Southeast Asia, situated cognition in modern institutions and the dynamics of experimentability in contemporary culture, science and design.
Anne Galloway leads the More-Than-Human Lab (http://morethanhumanlab.org/) and teaches in the Culture+Context Design programme at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Trained as an anthropologist, her ethnographic research critically examines entanglements of people, animals, spaces and technologies, and explores creative methods for public engagement around related matters of concern. Anne also spends as much time as possible at her rural home, where she shepherds small flocks of rare-breed sheep and ducks.
Carolin Gerlitz is Professor of Digital Media and Methods at the University of Siegen, Germany, and member of the Digital Methods Initiative Amsterdam. Her research focuses on platform studies, software cultures, apps, digital research methods, issue mapping, quantification in digital media and the value of social media data.
Priska Gisler is a sociologist and Professor and Head of Research Unit ‘Intermediality’ at University of the Arts, Berne. Her research fields are: social studies of science, ArtsSciences, human—animal relations, and educational policy.
Connor Graham is a Senior Lecturer at Tembusu College and a Research Fellow at the Science, Technology, and Society Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute at NUS. He has conducted ethnographic studies of technology in Australia, China, England, Northern Ireland and Singapore and has worked and published with anthropologists, computer scientists, historians, sociologists and scholars of information systems and science, technology and society (STS). His research centres on living and dying in the time of the Internet, with a particular focus on human–technology relations. Specifically, he researches perspectives on and approaches to the design of new information and communication technologies. Recently he has been situating his research in Asia.
Jennifer Green is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. Green has worked for over 30 years in Central Australia on projects documenting Indigenous languages, cultural history and visual arts. Her doctoral research on women’s sand stories pioneered methods for the recording and analysis of multimodal narrative practices. Recent collaborative work on Indigenous sign languages from Central Australia has resulted in an online sign language dictionary.
Gay Hawkins is a Research Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society Western Sydney University, Australia. Trained in sociology she researches in the areas of materiality, political theory, environments and markets. Her research is interdisciplinary and informed by current debates in political philosophy, science and technology studies and social theory. Her most recent book, co-authored with Kane Race and Emily Potter, is Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water (MIT Press, 2015).
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas has written five books on cult, horror and exploitation cinema, including Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011), Suspiria (Auteur, 2015) and Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press/Wallflower, 2017). She is an award-winning film critic, editor of the film journal Senses of Cinema, and a recipient of the 2017 Australian Film Institute Research Centre Fellowship. Alexandra is currently a research assistant at the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne).
Maja Horst is Professor and Head of the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on public communication about science and technology and on issues of research organization and management.
Alan Irwin is a Professor in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School. He has published over a number of years on issues of science and technology policy, environmental sociology and science–public relations.
Thomas Jellis is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Geography at the University of Oxford and a Research Fellow at Keble College. His research interests include experimental spaces, social theory, questions of disciplinarity, and research techniques. Thomas is currently working on a new project that examines exhaustion.
Ann Kirori has worked extensively in the NGO sector in Kenya. She joined the ERC-funded project, ‘The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa’, as a researcher in education and schools around Nairobi. Her work involved collecting qualitative data on the perceptions of dirt in various neighbourhoods of Nairobi through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observations. Other responsibilities in the project included transcribing and translating the data collected.
Sybille Lammes is Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Leiden. Her background is in media studies which she has always approached from an interdisciplinary angle, including cultural studies, game studies, science and technology studies and gender studies, and through working together with researchers with an interest in human–computer interaction, critical geography, social sciences and philosophy. Among others, she is co-editor of Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures (AUP, 2015), Playful Mapping in the Digital Age (INT, 2016), Time Travellers: Temporality and Digital Mapping (Manchester University Press, 2018 fc.), and The Playful Citizen: Power, Creativity, Knowledge (Amsterdam University Press, 2019 fc.).
Angela Last is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Leicester. She is interested in how people make sense of the world, whether this is through research practices or the adoption of geopolitical imaginaries. She has published on methods and ‘experimental geographies’ in academic journals, as well as her blog Mutable Matter.
Joanna Latimer is Professor of Sociology, Science & Technology at the University of York. She is interested in the worlds people make together and the biopolitics in which they are entangled and has written widely on the cultural, social and existential effects and affects of how science & medicine is done. Her many articles and books, include The Conduct of Care, shortlisted for the BSA Philip Abram’s Memorial Prize, and The Gene, The Clinic and The Family: Diagnosing Dysmorphology, Reviving Medical Dominance, winner of the 2014 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness annual book prize.
Ramon Lobato is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. His research interests include media markets, piracy and media globalization. His books include Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (British Film Institute, 2012), The Informal Media Economy (Polity, 2012, with J. Thomas), Geoblocking and Global Video Culture (Institute of Network Cultures, 2016, ed. with J. Meese) and Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution (NYU Press, 2018).
Celia Lury is Professor and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. Recent publications on methodology include: Inventive Methods, co-edited with Nina Wakeford (Routledge, 2012), and ‘Measure and Value’, co-edited with Lisa Adkins (Sociological Review Special Issue, 2012).
Nina Lykke, Professor Emerita, Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, is co-director of GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies as well as scientific leader of the Swedish-International Research School, InterGender. She has published extensively within the areas of feminist theory, intersectionality studies, feminist cultural studies and feminist technoscience studies, including Cosmodolphins (Zed Books, 2000, with Mette Bryld), Bits of Life (University of Washington Press, 2008, with Anneke Smelik), Feminist Studies (Routledge, 2010), Writing Academic Texts Differently (Routledge, 2014) and Assisted Reproduction Across Borders (Routledge, 2016, with Merete Lie). Her current research is a queerfeminist, autophenomenographic and poetic exploration of cancer cultures, death and mourning.
Laura U. Marks works on media art and philosophy. Her most recent books are Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT Press, 2015) and Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT Press, 2010). She curates programmes of experimental media for festivals and art spaces worldwide. Marks teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, where she is the Grant Strate University Professor.
Derek McCormack is an Associate Professor at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. He has written about affective spaces and nonrepresentational theory and is currently writing about atmospheres and the elemental. His book Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment is forthcoming with Duke University Press.
Greg McInerny is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. Originally trained as an ecologist, Greg now works among the broader topics of information visualization, scientific software and statistical modelling.
Axel Meunier is an independent researcher, cartographer and workshop facilitator. He is interested in how we live and work in a network-based material culture with multiple layers of reality. In the academy, he has worked at Sciences Po’s médialab, where his research concerns digital mapping and the participation of mixed communities of humans and non-humans in the making of environmental issues. He believes everyone should be able to make their own research tools. He also practises performance in the art field, where the artwork is not a finished product but a prototype to experiment new social situations.
Mike Michael is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Exeter. His research interests have touched on the relation of everyday life to technoscience, the role of culture in biomedicine, and the interplay of design and social scientific perspectives. Recent major publications include (co-authored with Marsha Rosengarten) Innovation and Biomedicine: Ethics, Evidence and Expectation in HIV (Palgrave, 2013) and Actor-Network Theory: Trials, Trails and Translations (Sage, 2017).
Anders Munk is Associate Professor in Techno-Anthropology and Director of the Techno-Anthropology Lab at the University of Aalborg in Copenhagen. His research interests include controversy mapping, science and technology studies (STS), public engagement with science (PES), pragmatism, actor-network theory (ANT), and new digital methods for the social sciences and humanities. Anders holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Oxford and an MA in European Ethnology from the University of Copenhagen. He has worked as a senior visiting researcher at the SciencesPo Médialab and received research funding from the ESRC and the Carlsberg Foundation.
Rolland Munro has written widely on key issues in social theory, including affect, class, identity and motility. He is Professor of Philosophy of Organisation, University of Leicester, and Honorary Professor, Department of Sociology, University of York.
Job Mwaura is a Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. His PhD research focuses on digital activism in Kenya. His research interests include social media studies in Africa, citizen journalism and political communication. In 2016, he won a fellowship with Next Generation of Social Science Research in Africa (SSRC) as well as a Post-Graduate Merit Award at Wits University. He recently won a research grant with the French Institute in Nairobi (IFRA). Before joining the ERC-funded ‘Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa’ project as a researcher in media and communication, he worked as a researcher and a lecturer in Media Studies at Moi University, Kenya.
Tahani Nadim is a sociologist of science and runs the Bureau for Troubles at the Natural History Museum in Berlin (Museum für Naturkunde). Her research examines, among other things, data practices and imaginaries in the biosciences, constructions of biodiversity in museums and the technics and politics of global taxonomy.
Jane Nebe is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol. She was the researcher in education and schools for ‘The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa’ project in Lagos, Nigeria. Her research interests revolve around poor academic achievement and educational aspirations, using qualitative research methods and mixed-methods designs.
Stephanie Newell is Professor of English and Senior Research Fellow in International and Area Studies at Yale University and Professor Extraordinaire in the English Department at Stellenbosch University. Her research focuses on the public sphere in colonial West Africa, particularly newspapers and pamphlets. She was Principal Investigator of ‘The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa’ project between 2013 and 2015, a project that transferred to Yale University from 2015–2016. Her most recent book, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa (Ohio, 2013), was shortlisted for the Herskovitz Prize in African Studies. Her current book, Histories of Dirt in West Africa: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos, is under contract with Duke University Press for publication in 2019.
Patrick Oloko (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Lagos in Nigeria. As Regional Coordinator of the Lagos team on the ERC-funded project, ‘The Cultural History of Dirt in West Africa’, he supervised field work and data gathering by the project researchers, interfaced with government authorities and the public on matters relating to the project, and worked closely with the Principal Investigator to ensure the smooth running of the project. His research and publications focus on contemporary Nigerian writing, particularly fiction.
Rebeccah Onwong’a has a Master of Biology (Human Ecology) degree from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and a Bachelor of Science (Botany/Zoology) from the University of Nairobi. Alongside this training, she has training in social science research. She worked on the ERC-funded ‘The Cultural History of Dirt in Africa’ project as a researcher in health and the environment. Her work involved collecting qualitative data on the perceptions of dirt in various neighbour-hoods in Nairobi Kenya. She used in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observations to collect the data, and was responsible for transcribing and translating the data collected. Currently, she works as a tutorial fellow at the Department of Ecology and Conservation, Technical University of Kenya.
Jussi Parikka is a professor at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. He has worked on media archaeology and is also the author of the books Digital Contagions (2nd edition, Peter Lang, 2016), Insect Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and A Geology of Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Sarah Pink is Distinguished Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Australia and Visiting Professor at Halmstad University, Sweden, and Loughborough University, UK. Her current research focuses on emerging technologies and design for well-being. Her recent books include Uncertainty and Possibility (with Yoko Akama and Shanti Sumartojo, Bloomsbury, 2018) and Anthropologies and Futures (with Juan Salazar, Andrew Irving and Johannes Sjoberg, Bloomsbury, 2017).
Jonathon Potskin is a doctoral student in the School of Social and Political Science, University of Sydney. His main research is on Indigenous youth and rap music in Canada and Australia: using music to continue cultural knowledge systems. Jonathon is a Nehiyaw (Cree) and Apeetogason (Mètis) and is a Member of the Sawridge First Nation in Alberta, Canada, who has a passion for sharing his cultural knowledge of the Cree and the Mètis people of Western Canada. Jonathon’s topic for his Master’s degree in Anthropology was Indigenous Research Methodologies and Decolonization of Anthropology.
Holger Pötzsch (PhD) is Associate Professor in Media and Documentation Studies at UiT Tromsø, Norway. He has published on themes such as war memories in films and games, borders and cultural production, as well as the role of technology in processes of bordering. Pötzsch has been involved as a researcher in the NRC project ‘Border Aesthetics’ (2010–2012) and the FP 7 project ‘EUBORDERSCAPES’ (2012–2016). He currently leads the development of the WAR/GAME-project at UiT Tromsø. His work has been published in journals such as Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, New Media & Society, Games & Culture, Nordicom Review, Journal of Borderlands Studies, Memory Studies and Media, War & Conflict.
Charles C. Ragin is Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. His main interests are methodology, political sociology and comparative-historical research. His books include Intersectional Inequality (University of Chicago, 2016, with Peer Fiss), Handbook of Case-Based Methods (Sage, 2009, with David Byrne), Configurational Comparative Methods (Sage, 2009, with Benoit Rihoux), Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond (University of Chicago, 2008), Fuzzy-Set Social Science (University of Chicago, 2000), The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (University of California, 1987) and What is a Case? (Cambridge University, 1992, with Howard S. Becker).
Matthew Reason is Professor of Theatre and Performance at York St John University (UK). Publications include Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance (Palgrave, 2006), The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre (Trentham, 2010) and, co-edited with Dee Reynolds, Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Contexts (Intellect, 2012). He has recently published a new edited collection, with Anja Lindelof, Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance (Routledge, 2017).
Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. He is director of the Govcom.org Foundation as well as the Digital Methods Initiative, and author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004) and Digital Methods (MIT Press, 2013). Rogers has received research grants from, among other institutions, the Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation and Gates Foundation.
Helen Scalway received her training (MA Fine Art) at Chelsea College of Art, London University of the Arts. Her practice is concerned with the representation of complex contemporary spaces, which are still coming into being. She works through the creation of diagrams, drawings, collages and models. She is currently an Honorary Research Associate in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Miguel Angel Sicart is an Associate Professor at the IT University, where he teaches Game Design and Play Design. He is the author of The Ethics of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2009), Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay (MIT Press, 2013) and Play Matters (MIT Press, 2014).
Ana Teixeira de Melo has a PhD in Clinical Psychology and is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Centre for Social Studies and the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Coimbra, in Portugal. She is a fellow of the Foundation for Science and Technology (SFRH/BPD/77781/2011). She has been conducting both basic and applied research with a focus on family and parenting, and, more recently, love as a complex system. She is also interested in issues related to interdisciplinarity, complexity and complex thinking, research methods, epistemology and the philosophy of science.
Manuel Tironi is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, P. Universidad Católica de Chile, where he convenes the Critical Studies on the Anthropocene group. His latest research focuses on toxicity, ecological politics and geological modes of knowing.
Olutoyosi Tokun worked as a researcher in Lagos, Nigeria, on the health and environment aspect of the ERC-funded project ‘The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa’. Her work involved engaging with managers and users and in the fields of public health, the environment and waste management. She holds a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from Monash University, Australia, and a Bachelor of Science degree from the Department of Biochemistry, University of Lagos. Her current research interests include the social and environmental determinants of health, particularly among Africans.
Emma Uprichard is Reader at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. She is co-editor with David Byrne of four volumes on ‘Cluster Analysis’ (Sage, 2012). Her disciplinary background is Sociology (with Education), but she turns to complexity science, which spreads across the disciplinary boundaries to rethink social science research and to research socio-spatial and temporal change relating to a range of multi-disciplinary, global substantive topics, including: time, childhood, food and cities.
John Uwa was a Researcher in Media and Communications for the ERC-funded project, ‘The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa’. His brief was to interact with media producers and consumers in order to collect data, through interviews and various media platforms, on the varying perceptions of ‘dirt’ in urban Lagos. He is currently a PhD student in the Department of English, University of Lagos. His research focuses on dramatic theatre (literary and popular), particularly the transformation of Nigerian popular theatre through the emergence of Nigerian Stand-Up comedy. He has published in Okike and other literary journals.
Tommaso Venturini is Lecturer at King’s College London in the Digital Humanities Department. He is also Associate Researcher at the Médialab of Sciences Po, Paris, which he founded with Bruno Latour and coordinated for six years. He has been the leading scientist of the projects EMAPS (climaps.eu – EU FP7) and MEDEA (projetmedea.hypotheses.org – ANR). His research focuses on Digital Methods, STS and Social Modernization. He teaches Controversy Mapping, Data Journalism and Information Design at graduate and undergraduate level. He trained in sociology and media studies at the University of Bologna, completed a PhD in Society of Information at the University of Milano Bicocca and a post-doc on social modernization in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bologna. He has been a visiting student at UCLA and was a visiting researcher at the CETCOPRA of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne. During his studies, he founded a web design agency and led several online communication projects.
Moritz Wedell holds a PhD from the Humboldt-University, Berlin. He taught German Medieval Literature and Culture at the Universities of Berlin and Zurich, and at the University of California at Berkeley. In his research, he addresses medieval poetics and historical anthropology, in particular the history of numerical knowledge (Zählen, Göttingen, 2011; Was zählt, Wien, 2012), and more recently the idea of human creativity.
Margaret Wertheim is a writer, artist and curator whose work focuses on the intersections of science and the wider cultural landscape. Her books include The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (W.W. Norton, 2000), a history of Western concepts of space, and Physics on the Fringe (Walker and Co., 2011), about the scientific equivalent of ‘outsider art’. Based in Los Angeles, Wertheim is founder and director of the Institute for Figuring (IFF), an organization devoted to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics. Through the IFF, she and her twin sister Christine Wertheim (a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts), have created exhibitions for the Hayward Gallery in London, the Science Gallery in Dublin, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Smithsonian in Washington DC. The sisters’ Crochet Coral Reef project is among the largest science and art endeavours in the world and has been conducted in over 35 cities and countries, including Australia, USA, Germany and the UAE. In 2015 Wertheim was a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
Alex Wilkie is a sociologist of science and technology and a Senior Lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests combine aspects of social theory, science and technology studies with experimental design research that bear on theoretical, methodological and substantive areas including: aesthetics, constructivist and speculative thought, situated design practice, healthcare and computational technologies, human–computer interaction design, as well as involvement, engagement and participation with science and technology. Alex is a Co-Director of the Centre for Invention and Social Process (Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths) and the Director of Research in Design. He has recently edited Studio Studies with Ignacio Farías (Routledge, 2015) and Speculative Research with Martin Savransky and Marsha Rosengarten (Routledge, 2017) and is currently preparing the edited volume Inventing the Social with Noortje Marres and Michael Guggenheim (Mattering Press).