Editorial Board

Nduka Otiono obtained his PhD from the University of Alberta, and recently joined Carleton from Brown University where he held a one-year postdoctoral fellowship, worked closely with Chinua Achebe as Senior Research Assistant, and was appointed a Visiting Assistant Professor. A fellow of the William Joiner Centre for War and Social Consequences, University of Massachusetts, Boston, his interdisciplinary research focuses on “street stories” or popular urban narratives in postcolonial Africa, and how they travel across multiple popular cultural platforms such as the news media, film, popular music, and social media. His research is informed by his background as a journalist and writer during the worst years of military dictatorship in Nigeria. His publications include scholarly essays in journals and books, as well as a volume of short stories, two volumes of poetry, and two anthologies which he co-edited. He was founding editor of The Post Express Literary Supplement (PELS), and other literary supplements in Nigeria. He has been a member of the organizing committee of the annual Achebe Colloquium on Africa at Brown University, and the board of Brown University’s Africana Film Festival. Nduka is currently an Assistant Professor at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University

Sinmi Akin-Aina holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from McGill University and a Masters of Social Work degree from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Sinmi has done extensive work in research, advocacy, and programming with refugee and immigrant communities and young women, on the  African continent and internationally. Her research focus is on urban refugees in Kenya, refugee and immigration policy in Africa and internationally, gender-based violence in conflict settings and African gender studies. Sinmi is currently a Research Associate at the African Leadership Centre for Peace, Conflict and Development Research, a joint initiative of King’s College London and the University of Nairobi. Sinmi has previously worked at the YWCA Montreal, the Library of Parliament Canada, and UNICEF Kenya.

Daniel Baheta has PhD degree from the University of Kyoto Japan in African studies and International Development. He obtained his Master’s degree in African Education from the University of Kyoto and his honors degree from Carleton University in Political Science and Sociology.   Currently, Daniel works with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).  He has worked at the Canadian International Development Agency since February 2006. As a Development Officer, he manages a portfolio of 5 operational projects (over $30 million in value), in Sudan focused around the sectors of governance, gender, education and capacity building.    Daniel uses a range of monitoring and evaluation techniques for these projects and works with local and Canadian partners to improve the life of people in Sudan.  He also has direct experience in negotiating and managing a variety of stakeholder need in international development. His accomplishments include three international publications regarding Eritrean Education, two countrywide survey reports in Basic Human Rights and Education in Eritrea and one research paper regarding the Eritrean Diasporas in Canada. He has advocated and helped lunched two successful human right policy campaigns in increasing awareness in girls’ education in Eritrea.  His life experiences in Africa as citizen of Ethiopia where he was born from Eritrean parents and as a refugee in Kenya, his educational background in Europe, North America and Asia has given him chance to broaden his cross-cultural interaction with different communities and societies around the world.

Emma Bider is a PhD student in social and cultural analysis at Concordia and a freelance editor based in Ottawa. She has a master’s degree in anthropology from Carleton University. Her master’s thesis combined ethnomusicology and  anthropology to analyze how drumming evoked a notion of home and cultural identity for Tuareg women living in Europe. Her current research examines how cultural relationships with landscapes affect climate change mitigation strategies.

Alex Caramento is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in the Department of Politics at York University. His dissertation research focuses on indigenous capital formation among Zambian mine suppliers and service providers in the Copperbelt and North Western Provinces. More broadly, his research interests include Zambian economic history, the political economy of mining in Southern Africa, and African industrialization policies. He has taught African political economy and history as an adjunct lecturer in the Department of History at Trent University, the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University, and the Department of Politics at York University.

Elizabeth Cobbett is a lecturer in International Political Economy at the University of East Anglia, UK. She earned her PhD at Carleton University in 2012 through her dissertation: South Africa in the Changing World Order: Power, Finance, and Society. Her current research agenda centres on emerging financial geographies of transnational monetary power across Africa as the continent deepens its integration into global capital networks. More specifically, her work examines the different ways in which global finance seeks profitable opportunities within localised social structures and outlines how African actors are extending their reach to embed global financial networks within national and local settings. Working within the tradition of Fernand Braudel, her analytical approach accentuates the significance of cultural and social factors often ignored by mainstream approaches to the political economy of global finance. Current research is being conducted in Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa with a view to publication of a monograph The Political Economy of African Financial Centres: The New Realm of Global Finance (forthcoming, Edward Elgar). Elizabeth has published in scholarly journals such as Third World Thematics, Journal of Critical Globalization Studies and Journal of Islamic Studies. She has contributed numerous book chapters notably in Making Things International: Vol 1. Circulation, edited by Mark Salter (Minnesota) and in The Power of Cities in International Relations, edited by Simon Curtis (Routledge).

Logan Cochrane is an Assistant Professor at Carleton University (Global and International Studies) and Adjunct Professor at Hawassa University (Institute for Policy and Development Research). For the last twelve years, he has worked in non-governmental organizations internationally, including in Afghanistan, Benin, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Qatar, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Logan has served as a Director for two non-governmental organizations, and worked as a consultant with clients that have included Save the Children, Management Sciences for Health, The Liaison Office, UNICEF and UNAIDS.

Christine Duff (Ph.D. University of Toronto) is Director of the Institute of African Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of French at Carleton University. She specializes in literatures of the Caribbean in French, African and Afro-Canadian literatures in French and English, through a postcolonial lens. Her current research interests focus on Haitian literature and the writing of Canadians of Haitian descent. Along with a monograph (Univers intimes: pour une poétique de l’intériorité au féminin dans dans la littérature caribéenne), Christine has published articles in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne and The Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Voix et images and Québec Studies. She is also co-editor of an essay collection on representations of the female body in francophone literatures of the Americas.

Anne Harley is a lecturer in adult education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg) in South Africa. Prior to joining the university, she did research work for an anti-apartheid women’s organisation and a land rights NGO. Working within the radical adult education tradition, her work focuses on counter-hegemonic learning and theorising, particularly in subaltern social movements, and is thus related to issues of emancipatory politics, the notion of civil society, and discourses of ‘development’ in South Africa and beyond. She recently co-edited Environmental Justice, Popular Struggle and Community Development (2019, Policy Press/Bristol University Press), and has also published numerous academic articles and chapters. She has also produced a number of popular publications. She leads the Paulo Freire Institute-South Africa.

Shireen Hassim is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa and Visiting Professor, WiSER, Wits University. She has written and edited several books including No Shortcuts to Power: Women and Policymaking in Africa, and Go Home or Die Here: Violence, Xenophobia and the Politics of Difference in South Africa and Women’s Organisations and Democracy: Contesting Authority. She has recently published an edited collection of the work of South African sociologist Fatima Meer.

Dr. Chris Huggins is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa. His research focuses on agricultural development, rural livelihoods, and natural resource management in Africa. Current research projects include ‘Collaborative governance and dispute resolution in the mining sector in the Great Lakes Region of Africa’ which has SSHRC funding. He has consulted for major UN agencies and international non-governmental organizations, worked with Human Rights Watch, and was for several years a Research Fellow at the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), Nairobi (where he maintains a position as non-resident Research Fellow). He has a PhD in Geography (specialization in political economy) from Carleton University. His monograph, Agricultural Reform in Rwanda: Authoritarianism, Markets and Zones of Governance was published by Zed Books in 2017.

Pablo Idahosa  TBA.

Wangui Kimari is a postdoctoral research fellow at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. She is also the participatory action research coordinator for Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), a community based organization in Nairobi..

An African of Eritrean origin, Luam Kidane’s curatorial work, research, and writing examines movement building at the intersections of Indigenous governance models, cultural production and articulations of self-determination. Luam has worked for over a decade as a researcher and strategist on food sovereignty, political economy, gender, sexuality and cultural production. She received a Master’s from McGill University, focusing her thesis on the liberatory value of cultural production. Luam is also the co-curator of NSOROMMA, a pan-African arts initiative, and has written several publications and articles on radical transformation in Africa.

Firoze Manji, a Kenyan with more than 40 years’ experience in international development, health and human rights, is the publisher of Daraja Press (www.darajapress.com). He is Adjunct Professor at the Institute of African Studies and Contract Instructor, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, Berlin, Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford (2001-2016) and, and Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies (http://www.ips-dc.org/about/assoc_fellows). He is the founder and former editor-in-chief of the prize-winning pan African social justice newsletter and website Pambazuka News (www.pambazuka.org) and Pambazuka Press (www.pambazukapress.org and the founder and former executive director (1997-2010) of Fahamu – Networks for Social Justice, a pan African organisation with bases in Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and the UK (www.fahamu.org).

He has previously worked as Africa Programme Director for Amnesty International, Chief Executive of the Aga Khan Foundation (UK), and Regional Representative for Health Sciences in Eastern and Southern Africa for the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC), researcher at the Kenya Medical Research Institute, and lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Nairobi.

He has published widely on health, human rights, development and politics. He is co-editor, with Sokari Ekine, of African Awakenings: The Emerging Revolutions and co-editor with Bill Fletcher Jr, of Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral. He was a member of the editorial board of the journal Development in Practice; a founding member of the steering group on the campaign for the ratification of the protocol on the rights of women in Africa Solidarity for African Women’s Rights. He has been a member of the International Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is member of the editorial board of AwaaZ Magazine (http://www.awaazmagazine.com/). He is a former board member of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and a former member of the board of Greenpeace Africa.  He is a member of the editorial review board of Global Critical Caribbean Thought. He is a member of the editorial board of Nokoko, Journal of the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, and a member of the international advisory board of the journal Philosophy and Global Affairs.  He is a research fellow of the Global Centre for Advanced Studies. He served as a member of the Permanent People’ Tribunal on the Role of TNCs in Southern Africa (2018-9). He is a former member of the boards of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and of Greenpeace Africa.

Toby Leon Moorsom is Adjunct Professor at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, and a Research Affiliate at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon where he is Co-Investigator, for the AHRC-GCRF (UK) funded project titled: “Farmers’ Perspectives on challenges in the food system: a collaborative research partnership”, with the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana and Leeds University Sustainability Research Institute. He has a PhD in History from Queen’s University.

James Murombedzi is currently the Coordinator of the African Climate Policy Centre of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Murombedzi is a political economist who has worked at the interface between science and policy in international organizations, including the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. He has carried out extensive research and published numerous articles and book chapters on climate policy and governance, natural resources governance, land tenure and agrarian reform across the African continent.

Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin is an assistant professor of Black Geographies in the Departments of Geography and Planning and Gender Studies at Queen’s University. She is a feminist scholar who is interested in African urban futures and Black futurity. She does urban ethnography work
concerning issues of gender, spirituality, spatial exclusion and financial inclusion. She also has a research focus on popular culture, both on the continent and in the diaspora, that explores issues of subjectivity and belonging as well as the use of Afrofuturism and Afropolitan Imagineering in geographic projects that address the politics of difference.

Richard Raber is a Ph.D student in African History at Indiana University Bloomington. His research centres on the complicated ethical worlds and memory formations surrounding counter-insurgency in Cold War Southern Africa. In addition to this, he has research interests in alternative human rights theory and practice. He holds degrees from the University of Winnipeg as well as the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation. In 2018, he was a Kathryn W. Davis Fellow for Peace hosted in the Portuguese School at Middlebury
College. Inspired by Sierra Leone’s heritage of strong inter-faith community, Richard co-founded Affixed Productions, a non-profit organization that uses public art and art education to harness the power of inter-faith community towards human rights both in Sierra Leone and abroad. He currently serves as an advisory member.

A socio-cultural anthropologist whose research interests gravitate around the politics and possibilities of international development, particularly concerning “civil society” in sub-Saharan Africa.  He has carried out research in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique. He has published Working on the Margins: Black Workers, White Farmers in Postcolonial Zimbabwe (2001, Zed Books & Weaver Press) and Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: The Ground of Politics (forthcoming, Indiana University Press), and numerous articles in academic journals and non-academic formats. He was the founding Director of the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University. He is a professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Carleton.

Professor Sylvia Tamale is a leading African feminist who teaches law at Makerere University in Uganda.  She holds a Bachelor of Laws from Makerere University, a Masters in Law from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Sociology and Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota.  Prof. Tamale was the first female Dean of Law in Uganda and has been a visiting professor at several universities including Oxford, Pretoria and Zimbabwe.  Her research interests include feminist analyses of—the Law, African Sexualities and African Politics.  She has published extensively and is the author of numerous publications including the groundbreaking When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda (Westview Press, 1999) and African Sexualities: A Reader (editor-Pambazuka Press, 2011).  Prof Tamale is the founding member of the Law, Gender and Sexuality Research Centre at Makerere University.

Dr. Daniel Tubb is an economic and environmental anthropologist. He joined the University of New Brunswick in 2016. From 2014 to 2016, Dr. Tubb was a Visiting Fellow at the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He earned a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from Carleton University in 2014, where he conducted doctoral research on gold mining and the political economy of natural resource extraction with Afro-descendant communities in northwest Colombia. He is writing a book about gold mining in the Colombian Pacific, which is under contract with the University of Washington Press. At UNB, Dr. Tubb is working on oil palm plantation agriculture and agrarian change in northwest Colombia. He is also beginning a new project on resource extraction along the Saint John River—from forests and mines to potatoes and refineries. His publications have focused human rights, violence, and citizenship, artisanal and small-scale mining, and the Black social economy in Colombia. He has received various research grants, including SSHRC funding at the MA, Ph.D., and Postdoctoral level.

Kaitlin holds a Bachelor of Arts Honours (BA) in Global Politics and Law from Carleton University and a Master of Arts (MA) in Political Science with a specialization in African Studies from Carleton University. She participated in the Institute of African Studies’ study abroad course during her Master’s degree studying Professor Rutherford’s course, Migration Lives and Livelihoods, in conjunction with Wits University in South Africa. During her Undergraduate degree, she interned for World University Services of Canada (WUSC) as a Youth Development Officer in Malawi to promote gender equality through sport. In 2017, Kaitlin interned for the Canadian International Development Platform (CIDP) as a researcher where she analyzed whether Canadian mining companies were complying with the Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act (ESTMA) and provided research assistance for development issues such as remittances, and transparency in the mining sector. Her research interests include: Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR), the corporate social responsibility of Canadian mining companies, the plight of refugees and the rights of children with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan and Eastern Africa. Kaitlin is currently a Federal Public Servant.

Christopher Webb is a critical human geographer working on youth, education and urban change in the global South and South Africa in particular. His doctoral research examined the connections between student protests, racialized poverty, and aspirations toward social mobility in South Africa. He is currently working on a research project on the role of financial inclusion in Southern African cash transfer programs.