Levi Boxell is a PhD candidate in Economics at Stanford University and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His research focuses on focus on media, polarization, and conflict. His other work can be found on his personal webpage.
Firoze Manji on the Failure of the Left in Africa
Firoze Manji, is Adjunct Professor at the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University. He is Kenyan with more than 40 years’ experience in international development, health and human rights, and is the publisher of Daraja Press. He is Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, and Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Pambazuka News and Pambazuka Press. He has previously worked as Africa Programme Director for Amnesty International, Chief Executive of the Aga Khan Foundation (UK), and Regional Representative for Health Sciences in Eastern and Southern Africa for the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC), researcher at the Kenya Medical Research Institute, and lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Nairobi. He has published widely on health, human rights, development and politics. He is co-editor, with Sokari Ekine, of African Awakenings: The Emerging Revolutions and co-editor with Bill Fletcher Jr, of Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral. He is a member of the editorial review board of Global Critical Caribbean Thought and member of the editorial board of Nokoko, journal of the Institute of African Studies. He holds a PhD and MSc from the University of London, and BDS from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Loren Balhorn on the German Elections and the Collapse of Die Linke
Loren Balhorn works as a Lead Editor at Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation. He also edits the German and US editions of Jacobin Magazine and serves as a board member of the Historical Materialism Book Series.
Jean and John Comaroff on Theory From the South
John Comaroff is Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology at Harvard University. Before joining the Department of African and African American Studies, John Comaroff was the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is also an Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, and an Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. His current research in South Africa is on crime, policing, and the workings of the state, on democracy and difference, and on postcolonial politics. His authored and edited books include, with Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (2 vols), Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Modernity and its Malcontents, Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Ethnicity, Inc., Zombies et Frontières A l'Ere Néolibérale, Theory from the South: or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa, and The Truth Abouth Crime: Policing and the Metaphysics of Disorder. With Jean Comaroff he is currently completing The Return of Khulekani Khumalo, Zombie Captive: Law, Imposture, and Personhood in Postcolonial South Africa, and co-editing Chiefship and the Customary in Contemporary Africa.
Jean Comaroff is Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology at Harvard University. Jean Comaroff was educated at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics. After a spell as research fellow in medical Anthropology at the University of Manchester, she moved to the University of Chicago, where she was remained until 2012 as the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. She is also Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. Her research, primarily conducted in southern Africa, has centered on processes of social and cultural transformation – the making and unmaking of colonial society, the nature of the postcolony, the late modern world viewed from the Global South. Her writing has covered a range of topics, from religion, medicine and body politics to state formation, crime, democracy and difference. Her publications include Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (1985), “Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: AIDS and the Global Order” (2007); and, with John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (vols. l [1991] and ll [1997]); Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992); Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (2000), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (2006), Ethnicity, Inc. (2009), Theory from the South, or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2011), and The Truth About Crime: Policing and the Metaphysics of Disorder in South Africa. In the pipeline is The Return of Khulekane Khumalo, Zombie Captive: Law, Imposture, and Personhood in Postcolonial South Africa. Also in process is an edited collection, Chiefship and the Customary in Contemporary Africa. A committed pedagogue, she has won awards for teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and has worked to enable college students to study abroad, especially in Africa.
Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven on the Work of Samir Amin
Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Development at King’s College, London. Her research is centered on the role of finance in development, structural features of underdevelopment, the political economy of development, and critically assessing the economics field.
She is also Founder and Editor of the blog Developing Economics, Founder and Steering Group member of Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ) and Coordinator of the Association for Heterodox Economics.
Dr. Vernelle Noel on Craft, Carnival, Architecture, and Artificial Intelligence
Vernelle A. A. Noel, Ph.D. is an architect, design scholar, artist, TED Speaker, and Director of the Situated Computation + Design Lab at Georgia Tech. where she investigates traditional and automated making, human-computer interaction, interdisciplinary creativity, and their intersections with society. Dr. Noel’s scholarship and expertise include design in the Trinidad Carnival, craft practices, architecture, and art. She builds new expressions, tools, and methodologies to explore social, cultural, and political aspects of making, computational design, and emerging technology for new social and technical reconfigurations of design practice, pedagogy, and publics. Her work is thoroughly interdisciplinary with training in architecture, design computation, science, technology, and society (sts) studies, media arts, and sciences; engineering, and arts. Her research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Mozilla Foundation, and ideas2innovation (i2i), among others. Dr. Noel is a recipient of the 2021 DigitalFUTURES Young Award for exceptional research and scholarship in the field of critical computational design.
Currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and the School of Interactive Computing, she teaches courses in design, computation, and architecture. She holds a Ph.D. in Architecture (Design Computing) from the Pennsylvania State University, an MS in Architecture (Design + Computation) from MIT, a B.Arch. from Howard University, and a Diploma in Civil Engineering from the John S. Donaldson Technical Institute (Trinidad & Tobago).
Peter Hudis on How Rosa Luxemburg Can Help Us Understand Racial Capitalism
Peter Hudis is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Oakton Community College and author of Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Brill, 2012) and Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto, 2015). He edited The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (Monthly Review Press, 2004) and The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso, 2013).
Police with dogs guard the grounds at the new Ellis Park Stadium, Johannesburg. 1/Jan/1982. UN Photo/DB.
Stefan Ouma on How Economics Would Change if Race and Racism Were Taken Seriously
Stefan Ouma holds the Chair of Economic Geography at the Department of Geography at the University of Bayreuth. Before that he worked as Doc and Post-Doc at Goethe-University, Frankfurt. His research interests lies in a theoretically and empirically informed economic geography of globalization and development, drawing primarily on insights from heterodox economics, political ecology, and post- and decolonial work. His overriding research goal is to rematerialize “the economy” in times of seemingly unbounded economic relations and to open it up for political debate regarding the more sustainable and just pathways and forms of economy-making. His current research on the political economy and ecology of global supply chains, the financialization of land and agriculture, the digital transformation of labor, and on “African Futures” reflect this orientation and complement existing foci of the Bayreuth Department of Geography.
He a member of the Editorial Collective of Antipode.
Photo by Thomas de LUZE on Unsplash
Adom Getachew on the Life and Work of Eric Williams
Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. Her first book, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, reconstructs an account of self-determination offered in the political thought of Black Atlantic anticolonial nationalists during the height of decolonization in the twentieth century. Adom holds a joint PhD in Political Science and African-American Studies from Yale University. She is on the faculty board of the Pozen Center for Human Rights, a fellow at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture.
James Robinson on the Origins of the Industrial Revolution
James Robinson is an economist and political scientist. He is currently the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. Robinson has conducted influential research in the field of political and economic development and the factors that are the root causes of conflict. His work explores the underlying relationship between poverty and the institutions of a society and how institutions emerge out of political conflicts.
Robinson has a particular interest in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. He is widely recognized as the co-author of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, with Daron Acemoglu, the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. Translated into 32 languages since its publication in 2012, the book offers a unique historic exploration of why some countries have flourished economically while others have fallen into poverty. He has also written and coauthored numerous books and articles, including the acclaimed Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (also with Acemoglu).
Portrait of Henry VIII by Joos van Cleve