The Participants

Patricia Birman is Cultural Anthropologist and Professor at the Department of Social Sciences, State University of Rio de Janeiro. She is head of the research group “religion in the public sphere of Rio de Janeiro”, has conducted and coordinated many research projects about the transformation of religious practices in Rio de Janeiro and has widely published in this field.

As the coordinator of the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa (IARA), a research unit of the University of Leuven, Belgium, professor Filip De Boeck (° Antwerp, 1961) is actively involved in teaching, promoting, coordinating and supervising research in and on Africa. Since 1987 he has conducted extensive field research in both rural and urban communities in D.R. Congo (ex-Zaire). His current theoretical interests include local subjectivities of crisis, postcolonial memory, youth and the politics of culture, and the transformation of private and public space in the urban context in Africa. Filip De Boeck has published extensively on his research and on a wide variety of topics including postcolonial identity in Africa, processes of accumulation and expenditure in informal economies, history, memory, death, and popular urban culture, especially with regard to children and youth. Together with Alcinda Honwana (currently Professor at the Open University, UK ) he edited Makers and Breakers. Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2005). Other book publications include Kinshasa. Tales of the Invisible City, a joint book project with photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart (Ghent/ Tervuren: Ludion / Royal Museum of Central Africa, 2004).

In 2004, together with architect and critic Koen Van Synghel, De Boeck co-curated an exhibition about Kinshasa for the ninth International Architecture Biennial in Venice. This exhibition, which was commissioned by the Flemish Architecture Institute (Vlaams Architectuur Instituut, VAI) was awarded a Golden Lion for best installation. Subsequently it travelled to Brussels (Palais des Beaux Arts,2005) and Johannesburg (Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2006). In 2008, De Boeck and Van Synghel curated another exhibition around the work of Kinshasa-based artist Pume Bylex for the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels. At the moment De Boeck is working on a documentary film about a cemetery in Kinshasa (together with Sarah Vanagt). He is also projecting to write a book on the diamond trade along the border between Congo and Angola

Edgar Cleijne is an artist, photographer and documentary filmmaker. He has extensevely worked on urban everyday life, urban cultures and architecture in diverse African cities. Edgar Cleijne lives in New York and Rotterdam.

Recent exhibitions: 2009: Moby Dick, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco ( USA ). 2008: Brussels Biennial, Brussels (Belgium ); Douala in Transition, Project(or) Rotterdam ( Netherlands ). 2007: Ars et Urbis - Doual'art, Douala ( Cameroon ). Spectacular City - Architekturfotografie - NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft, Dusseldorf (Germany). Passages from History. Recent Contemporary Acquisitions - Tate Modern, with Ellen Gallagher, London (UK), Uncontained - Whitney Museum of American Art,with E.G., New York City, NY (USA)

Asef Bayat, Professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies, holds the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research areas range from social movements and non-movements, religion-politics-everyday life, Islam and the modern world, to urban space and politics, and international development. His books include Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (Columbia University Press, 1997), Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford University Press, 2007), and most recently Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2009), and Being Young and Muslim: Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Julia Eckert is Professor for Social Anthropology at the University of Bern and head of the research group ‘Law against the State’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale which examines the juridification of protest and the globalisation of transnational legal norms. Her research interests are in legal anthropology, urban anthropology, the anthropology of the modern state, social movements and the anthropology of security. She is currently writing a book on the police in Bombay focusing on everyday conflicts over norms of justice, citizenship and authority. Among her publications on this research are f“The Trimurti of the State” in: Sociologus 2005; “From Subject to Citizen: Legalism from below and the Homogenisation of the Legal Sphere” in: Journal of Legal Pluralism 2006. She has worked extensively on the rise and practice of Hindu-nationalist movements in India (e.g. The Charisma of Direct Action, Oxford University Press, 2003). Other than India, she conducted research in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. She was a researcher at the German Institute for international pedagogical research, Frankfurt am Main, and lecturer at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and the Free University of Berlin from where she holds a PhD.

Werner Schiffauer, Prof. Dr. phil., born. 1951, holds the chair in comparative cultural and social anthropology at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). His main fields of research are migration, questions related to multicultural society, and developments in European Islam. He is a member of the Beirat für Migration (Council on Migration), the Sachverständigenrat deutscher Stiftungen für Integration und Migration (the Scientific Council of the Brandenburg Gate Foundation) and the Wissenschaftlichen Beirat der Stiftung Brandenburger Tor (scientific advistor of the Brandenburg Gate Foundation). Recent publications include Riva Kastoryano and Steven Vertovec, (ed.) Staat-Schule-Ethnizität. Waxmann Verlag Münster 2002: Parallelgesellschaften. Wieviel Wertekonsens braucht unsere Gesellschaft? Für eine kluge Politik der Differenz. Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld 2008

David Garbin is anthropologist at the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism (CRONEM), Roehamption University London. He completed his PhD in 2004 on the Bengali diaspora and transnational networks, after a 3-year ethnographic fieldwork in London (Tower Hamlets) and Bangladesh (Sylhet). On 2004-2005 he worked on a Leverhulme Trust-funded research project exploring acculturation and new identity dynamics among British Bangladeshi and mixed-heritage youth in London. He is currently a research fellow at the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism (CRONEM-Roehampton University), involved in the study of black Christians, Muslims and Hindus in London as part of a wider comparative research project in the UK, South Africa and Malaysia (funded by the Ford Foundation and SSRC, New York). He is conducting fieldwork among French-speaking Africans, mainly Congolese migrants in London, and British Asians. He is also undertaking fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa and Nkamba) as part of his study of the Kimbanguist church, one of the largest African independent churches. His research interests include migration, globalisation, diasporic processes, popular culture, transnational religion and the politics of identity and ethnicity in urban settings. Selected Publications: Garbin, D & Iqbal, J (Forthcoming 2008): ‘Diasporic identities and sacred territories: Islamisation and urban change in East London’ in Allen, C. (ed.): Muslim diversities: communities and contexts. London and New York: Kegan Paul