Dr. Anaheed Al-Hardan
Anaheed Al-Hardan is an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. Her research is concerned with coloniality and resistance in relation to counter-memory, decolonial knowledges and south-south thought in the Arab World, and has appeared in Journal of Palestine Studies, Qualitative Inquiry, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies and International Sociology. She is the author of the award-winning Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016), joint winner of the 2016 Academic Book Award at the London Palestine Book Awards. Her current book project examines Arab decolonial theory within the context of south-south philosophies of liberation and decolonization.
Dr. Sari Hanafi
Sari Hanafi is currently a Professor of Sociology and chair of the department of sociology, anthropology and media studies at the American University of Beirut. He is also the editor of Idafat: the Arab Journal of Sociology (Arabic). He is the Vice President of both the International Sociological Association and the Arab Council of Social Science. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on the political and economic sociology of the Palestinian diaspora and refugees; sociology of migration; transnationalism; politics of scientific research; civil society and elite formation and transitional justice.
Dr. Karim Makdisi
Karim Makdisi is an Associate Professor of International Relations, and Director of the Program in Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut (AUB). He also served as the Associate Director at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs from 2009-2014, and has coordinated the Environmental Policy program within AUB’s Interfaculty Environmental Sciences Program (IGESP) since 2004. Makdisi was a founding member and served on the first Board of Trustees of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), where he is also currently an associated researcher in the Critical Studies Working Group.
Dr. Livia Wick
Livia Wick is associate professor of anthropology in the Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies Department at the American University of Beirut who grew up in Ramallah, Palestine. She earned a BA from Brown University, an MA from the Institut National des Langues and Civilisations Orientales in Paris and a PhD from MIT. Her research and teaching interests are the Anthropology of medicine, science, birth, gender, war, oral history and infrastructure. She has conducted field research in Palestine and Lebanon. Her research has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation and the Palestinian American Research Center. Her book project explores birth during the Second Intifada (uprising) in Palestine. It follows stories about birth in various sites of the medical infrastructure in the Central West Bank, from hospitals, to village clinics and homes. It explores the lives and work of birth-mothers, doctors, midwives, nurses and families in a context of shrinking and militarized spaces.
Dr. Rami Zurayk
Rami Zurayk is a professor at the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences at the American University of Beirut, Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management Department. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) of the Committee of World Food Security (CFS), and a commissioner on the EAT-Lancet commission on sustainable diets from sustainable food systems. He is a founding member of the Arab Food Sovereignty Network, an advisory board member of SEAL (Social and Economic Action for Lebanon) and an advisory board member for the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development. He has worked and written extensively on the Arab World, focusing on the political ecology of Arab food security and its linkages with the agrarian question.