Sarah Banet-Weiser is Professor and Director of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles. She is also Professor in the School of Communication, and in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. Her teaching and research interests include feminist theory, race and the media, youth culture, popular and consumer culture, and citizenship and national identity. She teaches courses in culture and communication, gender and media, youth culture, feminist theory and cultural studies, including economic cultures. She is the author of the award-winning book Authentic™ (2014).
Manuel Castells is University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles. He is also Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, where he was Professor of City and Regional Planning and Professor of Sociology from 1979 to 2003 before joining USC. In addition, he is a Professor of Sociology at the Open University of Catalonia, and a Fellow of St. John’s College, University of Cambridge. He holds the Chair on the Network Society at the Collège d’études mondiales, Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris.
Sviatlana Hlebik holds a PhD in Economic Policy, MS in Finance and Risk Management, and MSc in Economic Cybernetics. She is the author of works on monetary policy, banking, and alternative economic practices during the financial crisis. She currently conducts research on bank regulation. She works in the Financial Management Directorate, Cariparma Crédit Agricole, Parma, Italy.
Giorgos Kallis is an environmental scientist working on ecological economics and political ecology. He is a Leverhulme visiting professor at SOAS and an ICREA professor at ICTA, Autonomous University of Barcelona. Before that he was a Marie Curie International Fellow at the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a PhD in Environmental Policy and Planning from the University of the Aegean in Greece, a Masters in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and a Masters in Environmental Engineering and a Bachelors in Chemistry from Imperial College, London.
Sarah Pink is RMIT Distinguished Professor in Design and Media Ethnography, and Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She is also Visiting Professor at Halmstad University (Sweden) and Loughborough University (UK) and Guest Professor at Free University Berlin (Germany). Her recent collaborative books include Digital Materialities (2016), Digital Ethnography (2016), Screen Ecologies (2016), Media, Anthropology and Public Engagement (2015), and the iBook Un/certainty (2015). She is the sole author of Doing Sensory Ethnography, 2nd edition (2015).
Kirsten Seale is senior researcher at the University of Western Sydney. Her current research interest focuses on informal urban street markets. She has examined how informal urban street markets facilitate the informal and formal economy not merely in terms of the traditional concerns of labor and consumption, but also in regards to cultural and spatial contingencies. Seale examines what these markets reveal about urban life in a time of globalized, rapid urbanization and flows of people, knowledge, and goods.
Lisa J. Servon is Professor and former Dean at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy, New School University, New York. Professor Servon holds a BA in Political Science from Bryn Mawr College, an MA in History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in Urban Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches in the Urban Policy Program at the Milano School and conducts research in the areas of urban poverty, community development, economic development, and issues of gender and race.
Lana Swartz is a post-doctoral researcher in the Social Media Collective of Microsoft Research in New England. In fall 2016, she will join the faculty of the University of Virginia as an assistant professor of Media Studies. She is working on a book on money as communication, both as a form of information transmission and as a vector of relations, memory, and culture.
Angelos Varvarousis is a researcher based in Barcelona, at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. He is a member in the Research and Development group of Barcelona, with a focus primarily on alternative economic practices in Greece.