PROFESSOR MERVAT HATEM (www) is at the Department of Political Science, Howard University, USA. Her research covers a wide variety of themes related to gender and politics in the Arab world, including Islamist and Secular discourses on citizenship in post-colonial world, the impact of structural adjustment programs and globalization on Arab and Muslim women and Islamic feminism. Professor Hatem has acted as the President of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). Her latest book Literature, Gender and Nation-Building in Nineteenth Century Egypt was published by Palgrave McMillan this year. Her keynote speech is titled as “The Arab Spring Meets the Occupy Wall Street Movement: Definitions of Citizenship in a Global World”.
DR SIAN LAZAR (www) is a fellow and lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK. She has engaged with collective politics in two quite different contexts: El Alto, an indigenous and mixed-ethnicity city in the Bolivian Andes, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. El Alto has become one of the most important centres of political radicalism in Bolivia. In 2003-2005, street protests concentrated in El Alto forced two of Bolivia’s presidents to resign, and in December 2005 Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales. She researched the processes and conflicts that lie behind this political power at the local level, considering in particular everyday practices and experiences of citizenship that structure the relationships between residents of El Alto and the Bolivian state. This resulted in a book El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia (2008, Duke University Press). It is an ethnography of citizenship that combines anthropological methods and theories with political philosophy. In Buenos Aires, she is working with public sector trade unions. Her interest is in the relationship between individual workers, trade unions and the state, examining the implications of that relationship for people’s political subjectivities and agency – their citizenship. Her keynote speech is titled as “Why is ‘citizenship’ important to ‘development’?”.
PROFESSOR CARLES FEIXA is at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Lleida, Spain. He has been visiting scholar at universities in Rome, Mexico, Paris, Berkeley/California, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile and Newcastle. He has conducted fieldwork in Spain and Latin America and authored several books, including Jovens na America Latina (with A. Caccia-Bava and Y. Gonzalez, 2004, Escrituras) and Global Youth? Hybrid Identities, Plural Worlds (with P. Nilan, London & New York, 2006). Professor Feixa has acted as an advisor for youth policies of the United Nations and Vice President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee “Sociology of Youth”.
DR GEOFFREY PLEYERS is FNRS Researcher at the U.C. Louvain (Belgium) and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and at the CADIS (EHESS, Paris). He teaches sociology of globalization and social movement at the U.C.Louvain and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He has conducted fieldwork on the global justice movement, World Social Forums, youth political commitment, young people in Bangalore, critical consumerism and social movements in Latin America. His latest books include Alter-Globalization. Becoming Actors in the Global Age (Polity, 2011), La Consummation Critique (as editor, DDB, Paris, 2011) and Movimientos Sociales (ed. with S. Zermeño & F. Mestries, Anthropos, Barcelona, 2007). Dr Pleyers is the vice president of RC47 “Social movements” of the International Sociological Association and the chair of RT 21 “Mouvements sociaux” of the French Sociological Association.
MR PEKKA HAAVISTO (www) is a Finnish politician and a Member of the Parliament with an extensive experience in international development and peace building efforts. In 1999-2005, Haavisto led the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) for the post-conflict environmental assessments and projects in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Middle East, Liberia and Sudan. In 2005-2007, Haavisto was acting as the European Union’s Special Representative for Sudan and Darfur and had a role as the EU’s special representative in the Darfur peace talks. In 2007, he served as the UN Senior Advisor in the Darfur peace process. Haavisto acts currently as a Special Representative of the Foreign Minister of Finland in African crises specializing in Sudan and Somalia.