Website
Email: benlaw@email.arizona.edu

Benjamin N. Lawrance is the former Conable Chair in International Studies at Rochester Institute of Technology and is currently a professor of history at the University of Arizona.He has conducted field research in West Africa since 1997 and published extensively about political and social conditions. He has served as an expert witness in the asylum cases for over 130 West Africans in the US, Europe and Canada which have involved human trafficking, citizenship, statelessness, female genital cutting, gender issues, gender identity, ethnic and religious violence, and witchcraft accusations.

Email: henrik.vigh@anthro.ku.dk

Dr Vigh is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. He completed his PhD in Social Anthropology in 2003. Vigh is the author of Navigating Terrains of War (Berghahn, 2006). He has researched issues of youth and conflict in both Europe and West Africa and has done extensive fieldwork in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. His areas of expertise are centred on network politics, non-state agents of violence and power. He is currently heading a comparative research project focusing on undocumented and irregular migration from Africa to Europe.

Email: mjohnson@bucknell.edu

In the late 1990s Dr Johnson began conducting research on Islam, ethnicity, and life course rituals among Mandinga people in Guinea-Bissau. Her first project focused on boys’ and girls’ initiation rituals and local responses to the global debate surrounding FGM/C practices. She has lived in both Bissau, the capital city, and in a small Mandinga village in the northern Oio region. Dr Johnson has published two chapters on female genital cutting practices in Guinea-Bissau: “Becoming a Muslim; Becoming a Person: Female ‘Circumcision,’ Religious Identity, and Personhood in Guinea-Bissau,” in Female “Circumcision in Africa: Culture, Controversy, and Change, and “Making Mandinga or Making Muslims? Debating Female Circumcision, Ethnicity, and Islam in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal,” In Transcultural Bodies: Female Genital Cutting in Global Context.  In 1999, she began working with Mandinga and Fula immigrants from Guinea-Bissau living in and around Lisbon, Portugal. Her work in the contemporary African diaspora has focused on how Guinean Muslims are arguing about what it means to be both “Africans” and “modern” Muslims in urban Europe, as they come in increased contact with Muslims from outside of Africa. Dr Johnson also routinely serve as an ‘expert witness’ on asylum cases in the United States for West African women who oppose the practice of FGM/C for themselves of for the American-born daughters.

Tel: +1 401 46 72 857,  603-744-6484
Email:  RLobban@ric.edu

Dr Richard A Lobban is an anthropologist and early pioneer in social networkmodeling, archaeologist, Egyptologist, and Sudanist, foreign policy expert, human rights activist. He is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and African Studies at Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island since 1972; also a lecturer at the Archaeological Institute of America and the Naval War College. He is an expert in Ancient Sudan and Ancient Egypt, with a particular focus on Nubia. Lobban has authored numerous books and publications such as the Historical Dictionary of Ancient and Medieval Nubia, Historical Dictionary of Sudan (2002), and Social Networks in Urban Sudan (1973). He has also authored/co-authored books such as Historical dictionary of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau (1997), Cape Verde: Crioulo colony to independent nation (1995), Historical dictionary of Cape Verde (2007), and Middle Eastern women and the invisible economy (1998).