Bodies and Corporealities

Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. Between 2014 and 2018 he was Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi, on secondment from the University of Edinburgh. He published The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage (UCL Press, 2006), Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), and The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe, 2000–2020: Bones, Rumours and Spirits (James Currey, 2022). He is currently editor of Africa, the journal of the International Africa Institute.

Annie Pfingst applies an interdisciplinary visual, archival, and discursive practice to encounters with the materiality and spatiality of carceral and colonizing geographies, emergency landscapes, geographies of resistance, and the legacy of settler colonial violence. She has exhibited and presented photographic, installation, and multi-media works at galleries, conferences, and symposia in London, Sydney, Nairobi, Berlin, and Java. In 2021, Annie created Haunting, a visual walk through the carceral landscapes of empire across Palestine and Kenya.

Craig Halliday is an artist and researcher who focuses on the intersection of art, politics, and activism and the potential of the arts and popular culture to extend and deepen the experience of democracy. From 2018 to 2020 he was co-editor of Nairobi Contemporary, the only print magazine dedicated to contemporary art in Kenya and the wider region.

Al-Almin Mutunga is a Kenya-based photographer. His work has been featured on The Daily Nation, BBC, Standard News, among other venues. His work was nominated at the Kenya MasterPieces Awards, documentary category, in 2016, and he was the lead photographer of Softie, a documentary which was voted best editorial at Sundance and nominated at the Oscars in 2020.

Doseline Kiguru is Lecturer in World Literatures in English at the University of Bristol. Her primary research interest is postcolonial print and digital cultures with a focus on African literary and cultural production mechanisms. She has published widely in this area and her articles have appeared in journals including Journal of English in Africa, Social Dynamics, African Studies, and Tydskrif vir letterkunde.

Naomi van Stapele is Professor in Inclusive Education at the Centre of Expertise Global and Inclusive Learning at THUAS, The Netherlands. Her long-term collaborative research with gangs and social justice activists in East-Africa and Europe focuses on gangs, masculinities, lived experiences of police violence, inclusive education, community organizing, and transforming authority. Naomi has published peer-reviewed research articles in Africa, Journal of Eastern African Studies, The European Journal of Development Research, Policing, Environment and Planning D. Society and Space, Conflict, Security and Development, and others. She also published peer reviewed chapters in several handbooks, such as The Political Economy of Gangs in a Global Perspective, The Oxford Handbook of Kenyan Politics, The Handbook on Gender and Sexuality in Africa, and Policing the Urban Periphery in Africa.

Tessa Diphoorn is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Her research and teaching focuses on security, violence, and sovereignty in Kenya and South Africa. She published Twilight Policing: Private Security and Violence in Urban South Africa (University of California Press, 2016) and is co-editor of Security Blurs: The Politics of Plural Security Provision (Routledge, 2019) with Erella Grassiani.

Peter Lockwood is a Hallsworth Early Career Research Fellow in Political Economy at the University of Manchester. He is completing a book about the crisis of “wasted men” in central Kenya: the region’s landscape of masculine destitution, its roots in the collapse of peasant livelihoods and lost hopes for middle-class futures. His published work has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social Analysis, and African Affairs.

Francesco Colona is Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Radboud University, Nijmegen (the Netherlands). He works at the intersection of human geography, political anthropology, and science and technologies studies. His research revolves around security, conflict, and environmental transitions.

Mark Lamont is currently a Lecturer in Sustainable Development at the Open University. He tinkers with social anthropology, history, global development, and medical humanities. He is also a member of Innogen.