3. Charting a middle course: Theory and methods in the practice of cross-cultural research

Felix Riede is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. He works in a broad and inclusive cultural evolutionary framework. Focused on understanding the interactions between social learning, niche construction, and environmental change, he explores the role of children in human cognitive evolution, and the role of object play as a motor for material culture variation, innovation, and adaptation.

April Nowell is a Paleolithic archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada. She specializes in the origins of art, language and modern cognition, Neanderthal lifeways, and the lives of children and adolescents in the Pleistocene. She is the author of Growing Up in the Ice Age, winner of the 2023 European Association of Archaeologists book prize.

Chantal Medaets is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the School of Education at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil, where she coordinates the Anthropology and Education Research Center (Ceape). She holds a Master’s degree in Education (2009) and a PhD in Social Anthropology (2015) both from Paris Descartes University (since 2022, Paris Cité University). She has carried out research on Indigenous and river dweller childhoods and forms of socialization in the Lower Tapajós region in the Brazilian Amazon, analyzing parenting styles, informal education (out of school transmission and learning practices) and its connections to the school. In her current research project, she deals with different aspects of the Indigenous presence in Higher Education in Brazil, combining ethnographic fieldwork at Unicamp with the analysis of intercultural educational politics for Higher Education at a national level

Mark Nielsen is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia, and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg. His research interests lie in a range of inter-related aspects of socio-cognitive development in young human children and non-human primates. His current research is primarily focused on charting the origins and development of human cultural cognition.

Ana Maria Gomes is Titular Professor at the Faculty of Education, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Bologna, Italy (1996). She was a postdoctoral researcher in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional-UFRJ, Brazil (2008), and in the Department of Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews, UK (2017). She has carried out f ield research with children in Brazilian metropolises and Italian Roma children. Since 2000, she has been working with Indigenous Peoples in different Brazilian States as a CNPq (National Research Council) researcher in the field of Anthropology and Education, mainly on the topics of Indigenous intercultural education, culture and schooling, learning and culture, cosmopolitics, and ecology of practices.

Gairan Pamei is a final year PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, researching literacies across educational-linguistic contexts. Her work is informed by developmental science of child learning and methodological advances in psychometrics.

Patricia Greenfield is Distinguished Professor of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, US. She earned her PhD from the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Harvard. Her dissertation focused on a cross-cultural study of culture and cognitive development in Senegal. Collaborating with international researchers, she has published cross-cultural and intergenerational studies on learning, socialization, and human development in Maya communities, Mexico; among Bedouin, Northern Arab, and Ethiopian immigrant populations in Israel; and within dominant majority groups in Burma/Myanmar, Romania, Japan, China, and Turkey. In the United States, she and her collaborators have conducted research on these topics among European Americans, Asian Americans, and immigrant groups from Mexico, Central America, and Korea.

Andrea Taverna holds a PhD in psychology and works as a researcher at the Instituto Rosario de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Educación (IRICE), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Universidad Nacional de Rosario (UNR), Argentina. Her current interest is the study of the acquisition of Wichi, an Indigenous language spoken in northern Argentina, as a mother tongue. She is currently describing the early grammaticalization process of complex morphology and the socialization context in which this ancestral language emerges. She is a group leader and since 2010 she and her students have been conducting fieldwork in the Wichi communities in collaboration with Indigenous teachers and community leaders.

Andrew D. Coppens is Associate Professor in the Department of Education, University of New Hampshire, US. Andrew Coppens’ research focuses on cultural processes of informal learning and development in family and community contexts. He has conducted research on young children’s development of collaborative helping with rural, middle-class, and Indigenous-heritage communities in the US, Mexico, Ecuador, Germany, India, and Bhutan. Coppens is founding PI of the Youth Retention Initiative, a research collaborative focused on developing sustainable and strengths based educational and workforce pathways to address human capital extraction patterns among rural communities.

Akira Takada is Professor in the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. He has worked with/among groups of the San of southern Africa (particularly !Xun and ǂAkhoe in Namibia, G|ui and Gǁana in Botswana) since the late 1990s. He has published a number of books and articles, including Hunters Among Farmers: The !Xun of Ekoka (2022), and The Ecology of Playful Childhood: The Diversity and Resilience of Caregiver-Child Interactions among the San of Southern Africa (2020).

Miguel Silan is the co-founder and Chief Behavioral Strategist in the Annecy Behavioral Science Lab, France. His work involves evaluating how behavioral science methods work and fail, and how to improve them, especially for vulnerable populations. He is also an Associate Director for the Psychological Science Accelerator, a network of more than 2,000 researchers across 84 countries, and is helping advance new ways of conducting large-scale collaborations in psychology.

Heidi Keller, Professor Emeritus of Human Sciences at University of Osnabrück, Germany, is currently a Distinguished Fellow of the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Besides cross-cultural development research on early child development, she is interested in the scientific and ethical problems of applying basic research to different fields of practice.

Kara Weisman is the Postdoctoral Project Director of the Developing Belief Network, Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, US. She is a cognitive scientist and developmental psychologist with roots in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. She received her PhD in psychology from Stanford University in 2019, followed by postdoctoral roles on two large scale, international collaborations in cultural anthropology and developmental science. Her work focuses on folk theories and their role in shaping people’s behaviors, relationships, and experiences.

Bruno Ferreira holds a Bachelor’s degree in History, Full Teaching License from the Regional University of the Northwest of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (1999), a Master’s degree in Education from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) (2014), and a PhD in Education from the Faculty of Education at the same university (2020). He is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, UFRGS, and a researcher in the Peabiru Research Group: Amerindian Education and Interculturality (CNPq/UFRGS). His research focuses on Indigenous Methodologies, Indigenous intellectuals, Indigenous school education, and intercultural education.