Regulating Relationships

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.

Dennis Muraguri is a mixed media artist working primarily in printmaking and sculpture. Recognized widely for his energetic woodcut prints featuring “matatu culture,” Muraguri captures the social interstices created by the explosive creativity in the unregulated transport economy of Kenya. He has exhibited extensively, including a solo exhibition at Montague Contemporary, New York (2020). He has participated in international art fairs such as Intersect Chicago 2020, 1:54 Contemporary Art Fair, London, 2016, and the Jo’burg Art Fair, 2016. Muraguri was also one of the participating artists in the 2014 KLA Public Art Festival, in Kampala, Uganda and a Selected Artist at the 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India.

Meghan E. Ference is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Her forthcoming book, Matatu Work: Gender, Labor and Mobility explores the working conditions of the men and women in Nairobi’s popular transportation sector and is based on two decades of ethnographic fieldwork with transport workers in Kenya.

Jean-Baptiste Lanne is a geographer and Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Université de Paris (Research Unit CESSMA). His research investigates creative and critical writing as a method to inform places and affects of subaltern security workers in the city. Rives d’où je vous veille (Présence Africaine, 2023) is his first novel.

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.

Bengt (Beppe) G. Karlsson is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. He is mainly working on issues relating indigenous peoples and the society-environment interface, with particular focus on the politics of ethnicity and nature in India. Karlsson is the author of Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People’s Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal (Routledge, 2000), Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India’s Northeast (Berghahn Books, 2011), Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (Cambridge University Press, 2019, co-authored with Dolly Kikon), and the edited volumes Indigeneity in India (Kegan Paul 2006, with Tanka B. Subba), Geographies of Difference: Explorations in Northeast Indian Studies (Routledge, 2017, with M. Vandenhelsken and M. Barkataki-Ruscheweyh), and Seedways: The Circulation, Care and Control of Plants in a Warming World (Vitterhetsakademien, 2021, with Annika Rabo).

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.

Gabrielle Lynch is a Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Warwick. Gabrielle’s research interests lie in understanding the nature and political salience of ethnic identities, impact and utility of reconciliation and transitional justice mechanisms, elections, and democratization, impact of social media, and judiciaries, with a focus on African politics. Lynch has published I Say to You: Ethnic politics and the Kalenjin of Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Performances of Injustice: The Politics of Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Kenya (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and The Moral Economy of Elections in Africa: Democracy, Voting and Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2022, with Nic Cheeseman and Justin Willis), as well as three edited collections and over forty articles and book chapters.

Tessa Diphoorn is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on policing, security, violence, and power and she analyses these societal and conceptual issues from an anthropological lens. Her ethnographic research is primarily based in South Africa and Kenya. She is the author of Twilight Policing: Private Security and Violence in Urban South Africa (University of California Press, 2016) and co-editor of the edited volume Security Blurs: The Politics of Plural Security Provision (Routledge, 2019). She is also the co-host and co-founder of the podcast series Travelling Concepts on Air where she and Brianne McGonigle Leyh, explore the notion of travelling concepts in academia.