Email: bmetz@ku.edu

Dr Brent E Metz, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Kansas. His research focuses on the changing quality of life and the politics of identity among impoverished Ch’orti’-Maya subsistence farmers in eastern Guatemala and western Honduras, and mestizos in the former Ch’orti’-speaking area of northwestern El Salvador. He is a co-founder of the Lawrence Centro Hispano, an applied field school in Honduras, and also of an Engineers Without Borders professional chapter, involving development in the broadest sense, including identity, consciousness raising, technology, health, and political participation. Besides his Mayan research, he has undertaken ethnographic research among Mexican-American migrant farmworkers in Michigan, on religious festivals in Seville, Spain, and of agrochemical practices among Costa Rican coffee farmers.

Email: egailk56@gmail.com

Elizabeth G. Kennedy, Ph.D. candidate, Geography, San Diego State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, MSc. University of Oxford. She has lived, worked and conducted research with Spanish-speaking communities for 13 years. Since beginning her doctoral program in 2011, she has published frequently in academic and popular presses. Journalists from numerous English-, French- and Spanish-language print, radio and television media have consulted her as an expert, and she provides expert testimony in Central American asylum seekers’ cases in Canada, Sweden, the UK and US. She focuses on the experiences and needs of child, youth and forced migrants

Email:  emoodie@illinois.edu

Dr Ellen Moodie is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy (Pennsylvania 2010), follows the circulation of the phrase “It’s worse than the war” in the years since peace accords were signed in that country 1992. Her second book, Central America in the New Millennium: Living Transition and Re-imagining Democracy , co-edited with Jennifer L. Burrell (Berghahn 2013), gathers anthropologists who work throughout the isthmus to explore the post-Cold War transition.  She has written for numerous academic publications and edited volumes. Her national prominence as a scholar of Central America was marked by the publication in Annual Review of Anthropology of “The Post-Cold War Anthropology of Central America” (November 2015). Her recent external awards and academic recognitions feature a residential fellowship at the Freie Universität in Berlin (2014); a National Science Foundation grant (2010-2013), and a Wenner-Gren Foundation grant (2008). At the University of Illinois, she was recently named a Conrad Humanities Fellow by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Professionally, she has served as the secretary and then co-chair of the Central America section of the Latin American Studies Association (2009-2014). Her public engagement on issues of Central America, begun as a college student activist in the 1980s, continues today. She has given numerous interviews and provided background information to journalists regarding Salvadoran politics and Central American migration. She has written affidavits for, and has testified in, asylum cases for Salvadorans and other Central Americans fleeing violence and insecurity in their countries.

Email: Vanden@usf.edu

Dr Harry Vanden is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of South Florida, Tamp. He holds a Ph.D., Polit­ical Science with a minor concentration in Latin American Studies from The New School for Social Research, New York, an M.A in Political Science and a graduate Certificate in Latin American Studies from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, a B.A.in International Affairs, minor in Spanish from Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania and a “Diploma” from the Universidad Computense de Madrid, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Madrid, España (New York University Junior Year in Spain). He has written and researched extensively on Central America political conditions and Central American Gang Activity. He has also carried out election observation in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Mozambique. He has acted as an expert Witness on country conditions in U.S. Immigration, Federal and State Courts in the areas of general political and social conditions, gangs and gang victimization in Central America, status of homosexuals and domestic violence. He has published extensively on social issues in the country.

Email: j.wiltbe@gmail.com

Email: simo.els@katamail.com

Simonetta Rossi has over 18 years of experience in the humanitarian and development fields and has worked for the United Nations and INGOs in the region. She has worked in El Salvador for over eight years supporting the recovery of the country after the peace agreement, including the return and reintegration of refugees, IDPs and ex-combatants. Ms Rossi has published on the Peace Agreement in El Salvador, and her research includes topics such as conflict prevention and citizen security and reintegration of former combatants in post-conflict countries.