Nina Glick-Schiller was the Director of the Cosmopolitan Cultures Institute at the University of Manchester. She was formerly Professor of Anthropology at University of New Hampshire.

In more than 80 articles and book chapters and three books, Nina Glick-Schiller developed a comparative and historical perspective on migration, transnational processes and social relations, diasporic connection and long distance nationalism. Her concern has been to explore differences of power within transnational social fields in relationship to the constitution of gender, race, class, status, poverty, the second generation, citizenship, and national identity. To foster publication from this perspective in 1992 she founded the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and edited it from 1992 to 2001. She has since served on the editorial boards of a range of journals including American Ethnologist, Social Analysis, Focaal, and Anthropological Theory. Her research has been conducted in Haiti, the United States, and Germany and she has worked with migrants from all regions of the globe.

Her most recent book projects develop migration theory by examining the relationship between the migrant and the city. These books contest the methodological nationalism of most migration studies that remain fixed within the comparative framework of individual nation-states and state policies. The first book, Locating Migration: The Migrant and the Scale (forthcoming), co-edited with Ayse Caglar, examines the relationship between the scalar positioning of cities and the pathways of migrant. The second book Pathways: Placing Migration Theory argues that the entire debate about immigration, assimilation, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and citizenship has very little to do with how migrants actually live their lives. Her current research documents the experiential cosmopolitanism that of accompanies migrants’ transformations of urban life.

James Holston is a political anthropologist. He is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also founding Director of the Social Apps Lab. His research focuses on the city as a strategic site for the emergence and erosion of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and democracy.  His current work investigates new forms of direct democracy and the development of software platforms for democratic assembly in public health and strategic planning.

His books include The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília, Cities and Citizenship, and Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil.  At the Social Apps Lab, he produces software platforms for mobile and web-based applications that address the terms and scales of democratic assembly, civic action, and urban knowledge.  His software projects include AppCivist.org and DengueChat.org which engage people in assembly-based direct democracy.  Various instances of these platforms concern participatory budgeting (Vallejo, CA), master planning (São Paulo), and community-based arbovirus vector control (Managua).  He has conducted extensive research in Brazil and is currently engaged in collaborative projects in Brazil, Denmark, Nicaragua, and the United States.

Loren Landau is a Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Oxford, Research Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s African Centre for Migration & Society, and co-director of the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab (MGL). He previously held visiting and faculty positions at Princeton, Georgetown, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He holds an MSc in Development Studies (LSE) and a PhD in Political Science (Berkeley) and is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.

His interdisciplinary scholarship explores mobility, multi-scale governance, and the transformation of socio-political communities across the Global South. Along with continued work on xenophobia, inclusion, and representation, he currently oversees a multi-year initiative exploring mobility, temporality, and urban politics in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. To help realign the politics of knowledge production on human mobility, he spearheads multiple initiatives supporting critical migration and urban studies across sub-Saharan Africa including the Academy for African Urban Diversity and the African Research University Alliance’s programme on ‘emerging urban subjectivities’ supporting doctoral students in Nairobi, Cape Town, Harare, Accra, and Johannesburg.

A frequent media resource on regional and global migration policy debates, he has published widely in the academic and popular press including the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy. Publications include, The Humanitarian Hangover: Displacement, Aid, and Transformation in Western Tanzania (Wits Press); Forging African Communities: Mobility, Integration, and Belonging (Palgrave); I Want to Go Home Forever: Stories of Becoming and Belonging in South Africa’s Great Metropolis (Wits Press); Contemporary Migration to South Africa (World Bank); and Exorcising the Demons Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa (UN University Press/Wits Press). He has consulted with the European Union, the World Bank, UNDP, UNHCR, UNECA, the Cities Alliance, and others. As chair of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa  (2004-2012) he served on the South African Immigration Advisory Board. 

Anne McNevin is Associate Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research. Anne was chair of the politics department from 2019-2021 and a Member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton from 2018-19. Anne received her PhD in Politics and International Relations from the Australian National University. Before coming to The New School she was Lecturer in Politics at Monash University, and a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow at RMIT, Melbourne. 

Anne’s research spans three broad areas: the transformation of citizenship and sovereignty, the regulation of borders and migration, and spatial and temporal dimensions of world politics. Her first book, Contesting Citizenship (Columbia UP, 2011), examines mobilizations by irregular migrants in the US, Europe and Australia in the context of neoliberal globalization. Later publications focus on the transnational governmental regimes that shape the experience of refugees and migrants in and around Indonesia. More recent work examines the deployment of time as a technique of border control and an arena of political struggle. She is currently working on a new book, World-Making and Border Politics, which aims to bring a world that is not defined by bordered states into the realm of serious political consideration. Some of this new work is prefigured in this article and this brief essay.