Notes on Contributors
Innocent Dande
is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State in South Africa. His research interests focus on animal history and the socio-cultural history of southern Africa. He did his undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Zimbabwe before proceeding to Stellenbosch University for his PhD (2017–2020).
James R. Fairhead
is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. As an environmental and medical anthropologist he has conducted fieldwork principally in west Africa (Republic of Guinea) and central Africa (Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo).
Jan-Bart Gewald
is a socio-cultural historian of southern Africa and professor of African History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Since 2024 he has led the project Boom to Dust: The Environmental History of Three Industrial Mining Centres in Southern Africa, 1870–2020 (https://www.boom2dust.nl/).
Jan Jansen
is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. He studied Anthropology and Medieval History at Utrecht University and obtained his PhD from Leiden University in 1995 with a critical analysis of the oral sources for the Mali Empire. His fieldwork resulted in numerous critical source editions of oral traditions and archival documents as well as on ethnographic studies of local heritage management, divination, and mining practices.
Sabine Luning
was an anthropologist at Leiden University with more than 35 years of fieldwork experience in West Africa. In the early 2000s she began working on gold mining in West Africa, with a particular focus on artisanal mining. Sabine was central to a number of research projects dealing with of which Gold Matters (http://gold-matters.org) was crucial.
Ettore Morelli
is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Basel. He holds a PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies and has held Postdoctoral positions at the University of Cape Town, the University of Pavia, and the African Studies Centre in Leiden. His main research topic is the history of central southern Africa from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on how power and time are treated by African authors and sources.
Joseph Mujere
is Lecturer in modern Africa at the University of York. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh. His thesis was published as Land, Migration and Belonging: A History of Basotho in Southern Rhodesia c.1890–1960s (Suffolk: James Currey, 2019). He has also published several articles in refereed journals, and taught at the University of Zimbabwe and the National University of Lesotho.
Iva Peša
is Assistant Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She is the Principal Investigator of the AFREXTRACT project, funded by the European Research Council. She has nearly twenty years of field research experience in Zambia. Her focus is on the environmental history of mining and oil drilling in Africa. In her work, she seeks to explain why people respond differently to severe pollution and environmental degradation.
Jabulani Shaba
is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the AFREXTRACT project at the University of Groningen, researching the political ecology of extraction. He obtained his PhD in History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa in 2023. His doctoral thesis was entitled Women’s Mining Worlds: A socio-environmental history of women in Artisanal Gold Mining in Zimbabwe with specific reference to Mazowe District c.1932 to 2021.
Saskia Stehouwer
is a poet and artistic researcher based in Frisia, the Netherlands. She published four volumes of poetry, one of which was handmade and entirely compostable. Saskia is a core member of the Climate Poets (Klimaatdichters), a collective of over 250 Dutch and Flemish poets who use their poetry to raise awareness around climate issues, with a focus on multispecies poetry.
Sandra Swart
is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She received her DPhil in Modern History from Oxford University in 2001, while simultaneously obtaining an MSc in Environmental Change and Management, also at Oxford. She studies the socio-environmental history of southern Africa, focusing on animals. She has authored/co-authored over 80 articles and chapters. Her most recent book is The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past (Jacana, 2023).
Harry Wels
is Associate Professor at the Department of Organization Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and at the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL at Leiden University). He holds an Extra-Ordinary Professorship at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of the Western Cape. His research focuses on multispecies organizational ethnography in the context of nature conservation in South(ern) Africa. Harry is Publication Manager at the ASCL and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography.