Mirjam de Bruijn is Professor of Citizenship and Identities in Africa at the African Studies Centre Leiden as of 1 September 2017. She is an anthropologist whose work has a clearly interdisciplinary character, with a preference for contemporary history and cultural studies. She focuses on the interrelationship between agency, marginality, mobility, communication and technology.  She is an Africanist with a focus on West and Central Africa. She has done extensive (qualitative) fieldwork in Cameroon, Chad and Mali. Her specific fields of interest are: nomadism, youth and children, social (in)security, poverty, marginality/social and economic exclusion, violence, human rights, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).

In Mali she has worked in the Mopti area with the Fulbe (Peul) and in Menaka with the Tamacheck (Tuareg). In Chad she has worked in N’Djamena (the capital) and in Central Chad with Hadjerai and Arab groups. In Cameroon she works in the Grassfields and the North. Her recent research focuses on urban youth and artists and their role in political movements.

From 2008 to 2013 Mirjam coordinated the research programme ‘Mobile Africa Revisited’, a comparative study of the interrelationship between Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), agency, marginality and mobility patterns in Africa. In 2012 Mirjam was awarded a Vici grant (NWO) for the research programme ‘Connecting in times of duress: understanding communication and conflict in Middle Africa’s mobile margins’. Since 2013 she has developed the project ‘Voice4Thought’ (V4T), which is an example of valorization of research. Recently she received funding from the World Bank for a project on Mobile Money (2015-2016) in Africa and from UNICEF (2016-2018) to develop a project on child soldiers in the Central African Republic.

Mirjam de Bruijn was appointed Professor of Contemporary History and Anthropology of Africa at the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University on 15 June 2007. She gave her inaugural lecture on 5 September 2008.

Read the text of the inaugural lecture (Dutch)

Read the text of the inaugural lecture (English)

Read the text of the VICI project grant application ‘Connecting times of duress'

Read Mirjam de Bruijn's blog Counter Voices in Africa

Han van Dijk is an anthropologist. Having studied forestry, his research now focuses on political decentralization, land tenure, natural resource management and farmer-herder strategies in response to climate variability and development policy. These topics revolve around the interaction between society and the environment and the social and political struggles arising out of such interaction. Han van Dijk, a researcher at the African Studies Centre Leiden, was appointed Professor of Law and Governance in Africa in the Department of Social Sciences at Wageningen University in September 2004. Prof. van Dijk can be reached in Wageningen on +31 (0)317 482960 or by e-mail han.vandijk@wur.nl
From 1 September 2007 until the end of 2012, Han van Dijk held the position of Scientific Director of CERES (Research School for Resource Studies for Development) in Utrecht.

Mayke Kaag is a social and political anthropologist interested in processes of change and continuity in West and West-Central Africa. She did her PhD on land use and social change in Senegal (Vrije Universiteit 2001). Her current research focuses primarily on African transnational relations, including land issues, transnational Islamic charities and engagements with the diaspora. She is the convenor of the collaborative research group ‘Africa in the World- Rethinking Africa’s Global Connections’.  Key publications include: ‘The Global Land Grab. Beyond the Hype’ (co-edited with Annelies Zoomers, Zed books 2014);  ‘Islamic charities from the Arab world in Africa : intercultural encounters of humanitarianism and morality’(2016); ‘Linking-in through education? : exploring the educational question in Africa from the perspective of flows and (dis)connections’ (2018), and  ‘A plea for kaleidoscopic knowledge production’ (together with Miriam Ocadiz, 2019).

Keywords: Africa in the world, political anthropology, religion and development, migration, land issues, informal workers, West-Africa.