Maryam Adjam is an ethnographer, currently based as researcher at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research interest includes the fields of memory studies and critical heritage studies. Using imaginative ethnographical methodologies such as ethnographic poetics she has been exploring the intersection between ethnography, photography and literature, focusing on practices of remembrance in relation to experiences of war and state sanctioned violence. Her current research project “The Heritage of the Missing” focuses on absence as concept in memory and processes of heritage making. She holds a PhD in ethnology from Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden.
Molly Andrews is Honorary Professor of Political Psychology at the Social Research Institute, University College London, and the co-director of the Association of Narrative Research and Practice. In 2019-2020, she was the Jane and Aatos Professor in Studies on Contemporary Society at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced StudiesHer books include Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology and Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (both Cambridge University Press), and Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press). She serves on the Editorial Board of five journals which are published in four countries, and her publications have appeared in Chinese, German, Swedish, Spanish, French, Czech, German and Finnish. For more information, see https://www.mollyandrews.co.uk
Oriana Bernasconi is assistant professor of Sociology, director of the PhD programme in Sociology, and co-director of the Human Rights and Memory Interdisciplinary Research Programme at Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Chile. In the last ten years her work has focused on the subjects of political violence and in the role that documentation of human rights violations and archives play in a society’s capacity to come to terms with evil pasts (see, “Resistance to Political Violence in Latin America. Documenting Atrocity” Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her later articles in English language have appeared in Subjectivity, Discourse & Society, International Journal of Transitional Justice.
Andreas Bieler is Professor of Political Economy in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham/UK. His general expertise is in the area of resistance to neo-liberal globalisation with a particular emphasis on the possible role of labour movements understood in a broad sense. He is author of (with Adam David Morton) of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2018) as well as Fighting for Water: Resisting Privatization in Europe (Zed Books, 2021). He maintains a blog on trade unions and global restructuring at http://andreasbieler.blogspot.co.uk
Jill Bradbury is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research focuses on intergenerational narratives, socio-historical theories of personhood, the transformation of higher education, and the (im)possibilities of individual and social change. She is principal investigator on the interdisciplinary NEST (Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation) research project. The project is engaged in both theoretical and empirical work to explore the ways in which narrative enables people to read them-selves and their place in the world and imagine possible alternative social realities and futures.
Jens Brockmeier is a professor of psychology at the American University of Paris. After degrees in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics/literary theory, he took on his first appointment as assistant professor of epistemology and philosophy of science at Free University Berlin. He has held teaching and research appointments at the University of Toronto, The New School, and Linacre College Oxford before joining the American University of Paris. His research is concerned with the cultural fabric of mind, memory, and language, which he has examined in various social contexts and under conditions of health and illness. A paperback edition of his latest book Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process was published in 2018 by OUP.
Neil Ferguson is Professor of Political Psychology at Liverpool Hope University, recent Fulbright Scholar at the University of Maryland and Visiting Research Fellow to the Changing Character of War Programme at Pembroke College, Oxford. His research has focused on political conflict and its psychological implications since he studied towards his PhD at the University of Ulster. He previously served as the Director of the Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies, a Research Fellow at University of St Andrews, and lectured at the University of Ulster. Professor Ferguson has also served as a member of the Governing Council for the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) and is a trustee of the Journal of Moral Education Trust. He also serves as an associate editor of Political Psychology and on the editorial committees of the Journal of Moral Education, Journal of Deradicalization and the Journal of Social and Political Psychology.
Tuomas Forsberg gained his MA from University of Helsinki in 1989 (Political Science, International Relations) and his PhD at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1998 (International Relations). He is docent at the universities of Helsinki and Lapland. He worked as the acting director (1998-2001) and senior research fellow of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, as Professor of Western European Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany (2002-04) and as Professor of International Relations at the University of Helsinki (2004-2008) before moving to the University of Tampere where he has been Professor of International Relations since 2008. His publications include Divided West: European Security and the Transatlantic Relationship (co-authored with Graeme Herd, Blackwell 2006), The European Union and Russia (co-authored with Hiski Haukkala, Palgrave 2016) and articles in journals such as International Affairs, Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Review, Security Dialogue and Journal of Common Market Studies.
Halleh Ghorashi is Full Professor of Diversity and Integration in the Department of Sociology at the VU (Vrije Universiteit) Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She has done research on the struggles of refugees in their path of inclusion for the past 25 years. She is the author and co-author of several books and has published many articles on topics such as identity, diasporic positioning and cultural diversity both inside and outside organizations. Her most recent international book publications are the edited volumes: Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies (together with K. Davis & P. Smets, eds., Emerald 2018) and Scholarly Engagement and Decolonisation: Views from South Africa, The Netherlands and the United States (together with M. Crul, L. Dick & A. Valenzuela, eds. Sun Media 2020). In 2017, she received this prestigious VICI grant on Engaged Scholarship and Narratives of Change from NWO. In 2018, she is appointed as a Crown Member of the SER (Dutch Social Economic Council) and in 2020 as a member of KNAW (The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences).
Catarina Kinnvall is Professor at the Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden, where she mainly teaches on the Masters program of Global Studies. Her research interests involve political psychology, international relations and critical security studies, with a particular focus on emotions, gender, migration and populism in Europe and South Asia. Her most recent publications have centred on building up the field of Ontological Security Studies, where she focuses on how anxiety, fear, anger and other emotional factors impact on and determine the search for secure identities at times of crisis and trauma. She is the author of numerous articles and books.
Eneken Laanes is Professor of Comparative Literature and Leader of ERC project Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena (2020–2024). She has published widely on transnational memory in Eastern Europe, transnational literature, historical novel and theories of subjectivity and self-writing. She is the author of Unresolved Dialogues: Subjectivity and Memory in Post-Soviet Estonian Novel (in Estonian, Tallinn: UTKK, 2009), the co-editor with Hanna Meretoja of the special issue “Memorial Forms” (Memory Studies, 2021) and the editor of the special issue “Entangled Cultures in the Baltic Region” (Journal of Baltic Studies, 2020). She has aldso co-edited with Linda Kaljundi and Ilona Pikkanen Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia (Helsinki: SKS, 2015).
Aura Lounasmaa is a university lecturer in international politics at Tampere University. She is in the executive board of Narrare Centre for interdisciplinary narrative studies. She is also one of the co-directors of the Association for Narrative Research and Practice. Prior to joining Tampere University she worked as a Senior Lecturer and Director of the OLIve course for refugees and asylum seekers at the University of East London. She writes about refugee access to universities, research ethics and narrative research and pedagogical practices.
Kesi Mahendran is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Social Psychology at the Open University. Her research programme aims to improve the dialogue between citizens and their governments on vexed political questions where consensus is not easily achieved –e.g. migration-mobility and citizenship. She established the Public Dialogue Psychology Collaboratory (PDPC) in 2020. She is a founding member and Chair of the British Psychological Society’s Political Psychology Section. She is a Board member of the IMISCOE Standing Committee on Reflexivities in Migration Studies and Section Editor at Journal of Social and Political Psychology. Kesi Mahendran is co-editor of Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and is currently writing The Migrating Self: The psychology of migration and the public (Routledge, 2023).
Jim McAuley is Professor of Political Sociology and Irish Studies at the University of Huddersfield, UK. He has taught in various guises in a multidisciplinary Social Science setting for many years, during which time he has produced many books, chapters, articles and refereed papers. Currently his research deals with a number of topics, focusing broadly on the consequences of post-conflict and peace processes and more broadly, identity construction, ethnic and political memory, violence prevention and concepts of radicalisation and terrorism. He retains a particular interest in the construction of loyalist and unionist identity identities in Ireland and the resulting narratives of identity. As part of a long term project he has published four recent books, Ulster’s Last Stand? (Irish Academic Press, 2010); Loyal to the Core (Irish Academic Press, 2011); The Democratic Unionist Party (Oxford, 2014); Very British Rebels? (Bloomsbury, 2016). He recently co-ordinated of the Economic and Social Research Council Seminar research seminar series on Northern Ireland and Memory and is working on two books following on from the material encountered in this series.
David Mwambari is a lecturer of African Security and Leadership Studies, African Leadership Centre, Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy, King’s College London, UK, a Colleborateur Scientifique, IACCHOS at Université Catholique Louvain (Belgium). He is a core faculty member at the Oxford Consortium on Human Rights, University of Oxford. His research interests are in fields of memory studies, peace and security, and refugee studies in East and Central Africa as well as among Afro-Diaspora communities in Europe, North America, and South America. More on his bio and publications here.
Minou Norouzi’s artistic and scholarly inquiries focus on reframing the ethics of representation. Her work examines the visual language and methods of documentary practice in an interdisciplinary context. Minou is interested in articulating how filmmakers communicate the ineffable through cinematic language and aesthetic productions that disrupt totalising accounts of history and knowledge production. She received her doctorate from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2018. Between 2011 – 2019, Minou was responsible for the creative direction and production of the Arts Council England funded film programming initiative Sheffield Fringe. She is currently Principal Investigator on “Revolutionary Patience: Migrant Perspectives on Doing Politics with the Documentary“ funded by Kone Foundation (University of Helsinki, 2021-2024). A study of diasporic cinemas, the project critiques empathy as a form of political engagement.
Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius is Postdoctoral Researcher (Core Fellow) in media and communication at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. Having previously done research on ethical trade communication, she is currently working on a project concerning mediated racism and nationalism in Poland. Her articles have been published in journals across disciplines such as Nations and Nationalism, Patterns of Prejudice, Globalizations, and International Journal of Cultural Studies.
Shirin Rai is Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the Director of the Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development. Her research interests are in performance and politics, political institutions and the political economy of development. Her latest book is Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament (with Carole Spary; OUP, 2019) and the Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (OUP, 2021). She is currently writing two books: Depletion: the human costs of caring and Doing Politics Sideways.
Eila Stepanova is a Finnish folklorist specializing in Karelian and more broadly in North Finnic lament poetry. She received her doctoral degree at the University of Helsinki in 2014. She is recognized as the foremost active expert on Karelian laments and as an expert in Karelian culture more generally, with a wide range of fieldwork experience. Stepanova is currently an executive director of the Karelian Cultural Society (Karjalan Sivistysseura).
Lotte Tarkka is Professor of Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include oral poetics, theories of genre, intertextuality in oral poetry, processes of traditionalization and authorization, vernacular and mythic imagination, and reconstructive performance studies. She specializes in the study of Finnic oral traditions, especially poetry in the Kalevala-meter, Elias Lönnrot’s epic, the Kalevala, and Viena Karelian culture. Her publications in English include the monograph Songs of the Border People. Genre, Reflexivity and Performance in Karelian Oral Poetry (2013). Tarkka is the President of the Finnish Literature Society, a member of the board of the Kalevala Society, and a member of Academia Europaea.
Reetta Toivanen is full professor in Sustainability Science (indigenous sustainabilities) at the Helsinki Institute for Sustainability Science (HELSUS) and a docent in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Helsinki. She is the vice-director of the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives (EuroStrorie) funded by the Academy of Finland (2018-2025). Since 2021 she was awarded the membership in the Finnish Society of Science and Letters. Professor Toivanen’s major areas of research and expertise are field research, ethnographic methods, anthropology of law, human rights, ethnic and national minorities, anti-discrimination in Europe, Arctic research, human rights teaching, multilingualism and language policy, and critical feminist theory. Her recent publications include: Young people, Wellbeing and Sustainable Arctic Communities, ed. with F. Stammler, Routledge 2021, Situating Sustainability: Key Concepts and Contexts, ed. with P. Krieg, University of Helsinki Press 2021, Beyond Legal Categories of Indigeneity and Minority-ness: The case of Roma and Falling in-between, in: Medda-Windischer, Boulter & Malloy (eds.) Extending the Protection to Migrant Populations in Europe – Old and new minorities. Routledge 2020.