Heli Rantavuo is an applied cultural studies and social sciences researcher based in Helsinki. For the past 15 years, she has worked in the technology industry in London, Stockholm and Helsinki, contributing and leading research in product and market strategy at Spotify, eBay, Microsoft and Nokia. Before working in the industry, she was a researcher at Aalto University, School of Media and Art where she graduated as Doctor of Arts, and at the Center of Welfare and Health in Finland. Heli is a founding member of the Human Sciences in Strategy association in Finland which brings together applied ..read more

Erin B. Taylor & Melanie T. Uy: Anthropologists & Authors of Better Research, Better Design: How to Align Teams and Build a Human-Centric Company Culture. Dr. Erin B. Taylor has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Sydney and is the founder of Finthropology, a company specializing in insights into people’s financial behaviour. She specializes in how people’s financial behaviour is changing along with innovation in financial services, and has carried out ethnographic research in the Caribbean, Africa and Europe. Erin is especially interested in how culture and group belonging in ..read more

Amina Alaoui Soulimani is a doctoral research fellow at HUMA, the Institute for Humanities in Africa. Amina holds an MSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics. Her current anthropological doctoral work at the University of Cape Town focuses on the ethics of care, AI, and the future hospital in Morocco. Gabriela Cabaña is a Ph.D. candidate at the LSE anthropology department. Gabriela is a transdisciplinary scholar originally trained in Sociology in Chile but also draws from political ecology and feminist theoretical perspectives. She is interested in the interplay betw ..read more

David Prendergast is Head of the Department of Anthropology and Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Maynooth University in Ireland. Previously David worked at Intel where he was a principal investigator at the ‘Technology Research for Independent Living Centre’ and co-founder of the ‘Intel Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities’. He has also served as Visiting Professor of Healthcare Innovation at the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Trinity College Dublin. He is currently working on a book with colleagues Jamie Saris and Katja Seidel about the lives of 94 older adults in ten ..read more

Rebecca Price is a researcher and assistant professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology where she investigates how design can advance sectors and industries through multi-leveled and networked innovation. Educated and practiced as an industrial designer, Rebecca was quickly drawn to the strategic potential of design as a source of resilience, and so pursued a Ph.D. in design-led innovation at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.   Her work increasingly explores the intersection between the design of socio ..read more

Kathleen leads Research & Insights at Dreams, a Fintech company built on behavioral science that boosts financial wellbeing. She is a Dutch national currently based in Stockholm and has worked with UX research for over a decade. Her main interests are innovation and technology with social impact, always trying to connect the dots between people off- and online. Besides working at Dreams she also hosts user research training and coaching. While teaching, mentoring & breathing research she does not try to learn about users and their behavior, but mostly makes sure that the product teams ..read more

Angelina Kussy is an economic anthropologist from Warsaw and activist with Barcelona en Comú, the citizen platform governing Barcelona, working for municipalism and Fearless Cities. We are happy to have Angelina with us speaking to her background and current work.  Angelina shares her views and dialectical relationship to activism & scholarship and takes us through the multiple projects she is currently engaged with. Her areas of interest are economic anthropology, especially work, public policies for social protection, the care crisis, and transnational migration in enlarged Europe ..read more

We are happy to have Cristina with us speaking to her background and current work. Cristina shares her views and relationship to activism and, as a scholar, the importance of balancing sympathy with a critical, analytical and self-reflexive research lens. What can an ethnographic perspective bring different than other research methods? What is the difference of applying ethnographic research to activist spaces vs others? What is the value of a conference space and why should you invest in physical attendance? Lastly as a key note of the Why the World needs Anthropologists, Mobilizing the plane ..read more

Julienne Weegels is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Amsterdam’s Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA). Her research interests include violence, (in)security, memory-making, and criminalization. For this ethnographic project, she carried out 31 months of field research with Nicaraguan inmates, through two theater programs in two prisons (a state prison and a police prison), between May 2009 and January 2016. She is particularly interested in the embodied (gendered, classed, and racialized) politics and aesthetics of order-making and ..read more

Alex Khasnabish is a writer, researcher, and teacher committed to collective liberation living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. He is a Professor in Sociology & Anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University. His research focuses on radical imagination, radical politics, social justice, and social movements. His recent books include What MovesUs: The Lives and Times of the Radical Imagination (co-edited with Max Haiven), The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (co-authored wi ..read more