Isaac Nyamongo
IUAES, Co-Chair WAU Steering Committee
Isaac K. Nyamongo is a Professor of Anthropology. He currently serves as the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Cooperative Development, Research and Innovation) at the Cooperative University of Kenya. He holds a PhD from the University of Florida, USA and has over 30 years in teaching, research, and consultancy. He has supervised and mentored more than 40 students both at Doctoral and Masters levels. Prof. Nyamongo has held research and training grants from many organizations including the European Union, World Health Organization, International Development Research Center, Wenner Gren Foundation and Toyota Foundation among others. His research and training experience spans several countries within the Africa region including Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea and has focused mainly on social drivers of the human condition and development. Prof. Nyamongo has more than 60 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals. In addition, he has published books and book chapters. Further, he has held visiting Professor positions in the US as a Fulbright Scholar (2009-2010) and in South Africa where he was a Carnegie Mellon Fellow (2012). He is a past Treasurer and President of the PanAfrican Anthropological Association and the recipient of the 2022 Pelto International Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), USA, and 2022 International Cooperative Champion Award from the US Overseas Cooperative Council (US OCDC). For his exemplary service, he was decorated with the Moran of the Burning Spear by the President of Kenya.
Gordon Mathews
WCAA, Co-Chair WAU Steering Committee
Gordon Mathews is a Research Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is the Deputy Chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations. He has written What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (1996), Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket (2000), Hong Kong China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (2008, with Lui Tai-lok and Ma Kit-wai), Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (2011), The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace (2017, with Linessa Dan Lin and Yang Yang) and Life After Death Today in the United States, Japan, and China (2023, with Yang Yang and Miu Ying Kwong). He has co-edited books on consumption in Hong Kong, the Japanese generation gap, pursuits of happiness around the world, and globalization from below. He has been involved with the Hong Kong Anthropological Society for several decades, as well as with the East Asian Anthropological Association, and has been co-editor of WCAA’s Déjà Lu since its founding, and also of Asian Anthropology. He has been teaching a weekly class of asylum seekers in Hong Kong for the past fifteen years, and also composes and performs electronic music: https://www.youtube.com/@gordonmathews2647/videos
Virginia R. Dominguez
IUAES
Virginia R. Dominguez (B.A., MPhil, and Ph.D. Yale) is the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Anthropology (and member of the Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Caribbean Studies faculty) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also co-Founder and consulting director of the International Forum for U.S. Studies (established in 1995) and co-editor of its book series, Global Studies of the United States. A political and legal anthropologist, she was president of the American Anthropological Association from 2009 to 2011, editor of American Ethnologist from 2002 to 2007, and president of the AAA’s Society for Cultural Anthropology from 1999 to 2001. In 2013 she helped the World Council of Anthropological Associations establish the Brazil-based Antropologos sem fronteiras (Anthropologists without Borders). Author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of multiple books, she is perhaps best known for her work on the Caribbean, the U.S., and Israel (especially in The Caribbean and Its Implications for the United States, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana, and People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel). Her most recent books are America Observed: On an International Anthropology of the United States (coedited with Jasmin Habib), Global Perspectives on the U.S. (coedited with Jane Desmond) and Anthropological Lives: An Introduction to the Profession of Anthropology (coauthored with Brigittine French). Prior to joining the University of Illinois faculty in 2007, she taught at Duke, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Iowa, and Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. She has also been Directrice d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) in Paris, a Simon Professor at the University of Manchester in England, a Mellon Fellow at the University of CapeTown in South Africa, a Morgan Lecturer at the University of Rochester in the U.S., a research fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and a Junior Fellow at Harvard. Internationally, she serves on the World Anthropological Union’s Steering Committee, the World Council of Anthropological Associations’ Organising Committee, and the International Science Council’s Finance and Fundraising Committee.
Clara Saraiva
WCAA, Deputy Chair WCAA
Institute of Social Sciences- University of Lisbon (ICS-UL)
Anita Nudelman
(IUAES) in rotation with Felipe Fernandes (IUAES)
Anita Nudelman (Ph.D.) is an applied medical anthropologist . She obtained her M.A. from National University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and her PhD from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) Budapest, Hungary. She lectures at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University, Israel, preparing students to work in different socio-cultural contexts in Israel and abroad . Her extensive work among Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, included interaction with traditional healers, workshops for health providers to bridge cultural and gender gaps in health care and health promotion and the development of an interactive model for adolescent sexual health, involving community members. She collaborated with colleagues in Africa on comprehensive culture and gender transformative sexuality education (including HIV prevention) for adolescents and youth, such SHIP – Sexual Health Improvement Project (Population Secretariat of Uganda MOF), and SLYCHA (Sierra Leone Youth Coalition on HIV and AIDS) and UNAIDS. As a consultant for international organizations (UNAIDS, ActionAid), she has led community-based Rapid Assessment Processes on culture and gender barriers to maternal and HIV health services, mostly in Africa. She was a member of the Management Committee of COST IS 1206: “Femicide across Europe” of the European Union Cooperation in Science and Technology Action (2014-2018) and is a member of the Israeli Observatory on Femicide. She is the Chair of the Commission on Anthropology of Pandemics, Deputy Head of the Council of Commissions (CoC) and Member of the Executive Committee of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Studies (IUAES). Member of the Steering Committee of WAU
WCAA
Greg Acciaioli
(IUAES) in rotation with Soumendra Patnaik (IUAES)
Greg Acciaioli is currently an IUAES Vice-President, as well as the deputy chair of the IUAES Commission on Anthropology and the Environment as well as. He first became engaged with the IUAES when he served as a Congress Service Corps volunteer at the 1973 International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Chicago. He has also served as president of both the Australian Anthropological Society and the Anthropological Society of Western Australia. He is now a senior honorary research fellow at The University of Western Australia, where he lectured in Anthropology and in Asian Studies for 29 years, as well as at Curtin University. After receiving his PhD from the Australian National University, he held visiting positions at Vassar College, Columbia University and the University of Arizona before beginning his position at The University of Western Australia in 1991. He has also held visiting research appointments at the Asia Research Institute of Murdoch University, Southeast Asia Research Centre of City University of Hong Kong, the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, and the Cairns Institute of James Cook University. Besides academic research in Indonesia and Malaysia on such topics as conservation contestations in terrestrial and marine parks, resulting in book chapters and articles in anthropological, conservation biology, and Asian studies journals, as well as the collection he co-edited entitled Biodiversity and Human Livelihoods in Protected Areas: Case Studies from the Malay Archipelago, he has also undertaken development- and conservation-related research as an applied anthropologist in the region, focussing on the social impacts of agricultural intensification in Indonesia, rural poverty, farmer classification of livestock diseases and other issues in Indonesia. Most recently he has been working on theorising the frontier as a model for understanding the dynamics of the Bugis diaspora in and beyond Indonesia, issues of representation in local festivals, and the implications of statelessness for the position of the Bajau Laut in Sabah
Michel Bouchard
Michel Bouchard is a Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Northern British Columbia in Canada. He served as President of the Canadian Anthropology Society/Société Canadienne d’Anthropologie (CASCA). He has researched ethnicity and nationalism, particularly in Eastern Europe and Russia. He has studied the history of French-speaking populations in Western North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. This past decade, he has studied Métis ethnogenesis and has published a number of books examining historical Métis communities. These include Bois-Brûlés: The Untold Story of the Métis of Western Québec. Vancouver: UBCPress, 2020. Co-authored with Sébastien Malette and Guillaume Marcottehttp://www.ubcpress.ca/bois-brules as well as the winner of the 2020 Prix du Canada Prize Les Bois-Brûlés de l’Outaouais. Une étude ethnoculturelle des Métis de la Gatineau. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Co-authored with Sébastien Malette and Guillaume Marcotte. https://www.pulaval.com/produit/les-bois-brules-de-l-outaouais-etude-ethnoculturelle-et-juridique-des-metis-de-la-gatineau.
He is serving as WAU Secretary.
Helen Macdonald
Helen Macdonald is Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town. A social anthropologist with a BA, BCom and MA from the University of Otago in her native New Zealand, and a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Drawing on 25 years of research, she recently published with Routledge Witch Accusations from Central India: The Fragmented Urn. This book positions witchcraft in light of current dialogues around modernity, post colonialism, violence and where alternative beliefs to those imagined as rational can and should be engaged, yet extends the conversation beyond the African continent where very little attention has been focused. For the last decade she has led a research project entitled The Social Markers of TB that has worked with ethnographic research methods to understand TB infected persons, their families, care providers, and social networks. This international Medical Humanities project in partnership with community led NGOs in both South Africa and India was an important and valuable foundation in bridging anthropology with other disciplines to try to bring further insight to the controversial issues surrounding TB. Her new research interests look at the way parents have allied (or not) with their transgender children and with many others to better understand, explain, and undo structural transphobia and the intersection with gendered and racialized discrimination. She is the WAU Treasurer.
Edward Liebow
Edward Liebow served as Executive Director of the American Anthropological Association from 2012-2023. Before being named AAA director, Ed enjoyed a long career with the non-profit Battelle Memorial Institute, where he was director of the Centers for Public Health Research and Evaluation and for 27 years conducted research on a variety of environmental, public health, and social policy issues. He received his PhD from Arizona State University, and maintains affiliations with the University of Washington and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. He was a Senior Fellow of the Fulbright Commission, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Society for Applied Anthropology. In addition to the WAU Steering Committee, he has served on the boards of the National Humanities Alliance, the Consortium of Social Science Associations, the Society for Applied Anthropology, the American Anthropological Association, the National Institute of Social Sciences, and the Burroughs-Wellcome Foundation.