Ashley Carse, Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University

Ashley Carse is Assistant Professor of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal (MIT Press, 2014). Trained as an anthropologist, Carse’s work also engages geography, environmental history, and science and technology studies. Thematically, he focuses on global transportation, the social dimensions of infrastructure, and environmental politics. He has worked in Panama for over a decade and is currently developing a multi-sited ethnography of the shipping industry that traces connections between the recent Panama Canal expansion and environmental change in the southeastern United States. https://vanderbilt.academia.edu/AshleyCarse

Penny Harvey, Professor, University of Manchester

Penny Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is also Professor II at the University of Oslo, and she has previously held a similar position at the University of Bergen. She has carried out ethnographic research in Peru, Spain and the UK and published widely on politics and power, on language, representation, (mis)communication, technology, infrastructure, expertise and the modern state. She is co-editor of the Routledge book series Culture, Economy and the Social. She was the Convening Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) and co-founded The Beam nuclear and social research network in collaboration with the University of Manchester’s Dalton Nuclear Institute. She is currently directing an ethnographic project on Holistic Decommissioning in the (UK) nuclear industry.

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, Professor, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Unidad

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro Ph. D. in Anthropology (CUNY, 1988). Full Professor (Autonomous Metropolitan University – Lerma, Mexico) and National Researcher level 3 of the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology. He was a Full Professor at the University of Brasilia and a visiting professor in Argentina, Colombia, France, South Africa and the USA. His fields of research include topics such as development, international migration, cyberculture, globalization and transnationalism. He has published many books, articles and chapters in seven languages. He was an advisor to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; the president of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology; and the first chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations. He is a Honorary Member of the International Union of Anthropologicial and Ethnological Sciences.

Gisa Weszkalnys, Associate Professor, London School of Economics

Gisa Weszkalnys is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She has carried out intensive research on the politics of urban planning, resulting in the monograph Berlin, Alexanderplatz: Transforming Place in a Unified Germany (2010) and an edited volume Elusive Promises: Planning in the Contemporary World (ed. with Simone Abram, 2013). Her current book project builds on her long-term fieldwork in the emergent oil economy of São Tomé and Príncipe and examines future making as a significant material and affective endeavour critical to contemporary capitalism.

Discussant

Jerome Whitington, Visiting Assistant Professor, New York University