Making Lives

Peter Lockwood is a Hallsworth Early Career Research Fellow in Political Economy at the University of Manchester. Previously he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute, Geneva (IHEID) on Project SALMEA (Self-Accomplishment and Local Moralities in Eastern Africa) and a Teaching Associate and Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge where he gained his PhD in 2021. 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.

Onyis Martin is a visual artist based out of the Kobo Trust, where along with other artists, he mentors and facilitates aspiring artists with opportunities to develop their talent. Experimenting with a wide range of materials, Martin explores the human condition and the global geo-political interface, specifically through issues surrounding human trafficking, migration, corruption, and displacement. In his most recent group of works, Talking Walls (2016), Martin extended his exploration of how information depends on and is influenced by freedom and social structure towards investigating the rise of consumerism.

Mario Schmidt is Senior Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), where his geographical focus is on rural Western Kenya and Nairobi. His research focuses on economic practices, narratives, and discourses in rural east Africa. He has recently published Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi: The Pressure of being a Man in an African City (James Currey, 2024).

Wambui Wamae Kamiru Collymore has been developing artwork around the theme of colonialism, identity, and independence in Africa. She is the founder of The Art Space, an online contemporary gallery with alternative show spaces, based in Nairobi. Her work has been exhibited in Kenya, South Africa, Poland, Germany, and Denmark. She lives and works in Nairobi. http://wambuikamiru.com/

Josh Doble is Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and the Policy Manager at Community Land Scotland. His research focuses on histories of land, emotions, settler colonialism, and race. He has recently co-edited two collections, British Culture after Empire: Race, Decolonisation and Migration since 1945 (Manchester University Press, 2023) and Gender, Emotion and Power, 1750–2020 (University of London Press, 2023).

Wangui Kimari is an anthropologist and Junior Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town. Her work draws on many local histories and theoretical approaches, including oral narratives, assemblage theory, urban political ecology, the Black radical tradition, the anthropology of empire, the anthropology of violence, and the anthropology of subjectivity. Wangui is also the participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Centre and an editorial board member of the online publication Africa Is a Country.

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.