Juan Orrantia

Juan Orrantia is a Colombian photographer and artist based in South Africa. He makes pictures that heighten subjectivity and through it question assumptions about identity, history, representations, and the image. He has been awarded the Fiebre Photobook Award, Smithsonian Artist Fellowship, Centro de Montevideo Latin American Photobook, the Tierney Fellowship in Photography, and exhibited at venues such as the Centro de la Imagen-Mexico City, Lisbon Photobook Fair, Rencontres de Bamako, Khoj-New Delhi, New York Photo Festival among others. He holds an MFA in Photography from Hartford Art School and a doctorate in Visual anthropology.

Olga Cielemęcka

Olga Cielemęcka is a Turku Institute for Advanced Studies postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Gender Studies, University of Turku in Finland. A feminist researcher and philosopher, she brings contemporary philosophy, feminist, and queer approaches into a reflection on environmental change. In this context, she explores questions of extinction, survival, and common futures. Her current research project focuses on the intersection of nature, nation, and gender in the Białowieża Forest in Poland.

Amade M’charek

Amade M’charek is Professor of Anthropology of Science at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. She is the PI of the RaceFaceID project, an ERC-consolidator project on forensic identification and the making of face and race. Although she has also conducted research on medical practices, her focus is mainly on genetic diversity, population genetics and forensic DNA practices. Her interest is in the ir/relevance of race in such practice and the ways in which race is done in them, and in the relation between the individual and the collective. She has published on these topics, in various academic journals. Next to the topic of race, in her most recent research on forensics also addresses the issue of migration and the forensic identification of dead migrants.

Margaret Gibson

Margaret Gibson is a Senior Lecturer in cultural sociology at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. Her research focuses on representations of death and dying in film and media culture, mourning and its material memories in physical objects and digital traces, and intimate publics of death and memorialisation on social media. Her book publications include: Living and Dying in a Virtual World:  Digital Kinships, Nostalgia, and Mourning in Second Life, co-authored with Clarissa Carden (Palgrave, 2019), Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life (MUP, 2008), and The Moral Uncanny in Netflix’s Black Mirror (edited with Clarissa Carden: forthcoming 2020, Palgrave).

Penny Siopis

 Penny Siopis is an artist who lives and works in Cape Town, where she is Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. She explores the intersection of personal and public histories in South Africa in a diverse artistic practice which has consistently engaged the complex entanglement of materiality, process and politics. In the 1980s she produced history paintings that addressed race and gender representation in public narratives, including the story of Sarah Baartman. In the ‘90s, she began making videos and monumental installations using found material.  In her films she combines found 8mm and 16mm home movie footage with text and music, to shape stories about people caught up in larger political and social upheavals.  In her film Communion (2011), the account is of an Irish nun, Sister Aidan, who was also a medical doctor, Elsie Quinlan, tragically murdered in an anti-apartheid protest in the Eastern Cape during the Defiance Campaign of 1952.  In the work, which is both fictional and historically accurate, Siopis situates Sister Aidan’s ‘voice’ (read as subtitles) in the first person as she narrates her own death, as if from the grave. https://pennysiopis.com/

Penelope Papailias

Penelope Papailias teaches anthropology at the University of Thessaly, where she also directs the Laboratory of Social Anthropology. She has written extensively on cultural memory, historical culture and witnessing, focusing on the intersection of technology and culture in critical media events, affective networks, spectacles of public death, social mourning and performative memorialization. Her books include Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Digital Ethnography (2015, in Greek, with P. Petridis). Her current research is focused on the ethics and politics of witnessing the dead body in the social media era. Penelope is also particularly interested in exploring the possibilities of digital technologies in pedagogy, research and dissemination of scholarship and expanding the agenda of experimental humanities. 

Pamila Gupta

Pamila Gupta is Professor at WISER (Wits Institute for Social and 
Economic Research) at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. Her research explores Lusophone (post)colonial links and legacies in India and Africa. She has published in Interventions, South African Historical Journal, African Studies, Social Dynamics, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Ler Historia, Ecologie & Politique, and Public Culture. She has recently co-edited thematic special issues for Feminist Theory, Radical History Review, and Critical Arts. She is the co-editor of Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean with Isabel Hofmeyer and Michale Pearson (UNISA, 2010). Her monograph entitled The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the  Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India was published by Manchester University Press (2014). Her newest collection of essays entitled Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography was recently published with Bloomsbury Academic (2019).
https://wiser.wits.ac.za/users/pamila-gupta

Alexandra Siotou
Teaching Fellow

Alexandra Siotou holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Love, Gendered Identities and Power Relationships: Examining Migrant’s Transnational Lives,” explores the complex relation between power, subjectivity and emotion revealing an under-researched dimension of migratory experience. She has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University in Canada. She is currently participating as a postdoctoral fellow in the research project “Anthro-bombing: Narrative experimentations for the design of a public anthropology platform” at the University of Thessaly. Her research interests include the anthropology of migration, emotions, gender, sexuality and body politics.

Alexandros Papageorgiou
Teaching Fellow

Alexandros Papageorgiou (PSL cohort 2017 & 2019) is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the IAKA department of the University of Thessaly, conducting research on contemporary processes of grassroots knowledge transfer across cultural and institutional contexts. Specifically, he is studying how ideas and practices of cooperation that have been applied in different localities are being introduced, translated and (re)produced in Greece today. He is also interested in experimenting with non-textual ways of academic knowledge production and dissemination, hence his participation in the ongoing research project ‘Anthrobombing: Narrative experimentations for the design of a public anthropology platform’.