Karachi
Yaminay N. Chaudhri is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and mother. She uses a range of media to unpack architectures of aspiration in contemporary South Asian cities. Her work moves across the personal and collective— house and city— linking middle-class aspirations with the shrinking of the commons. She is currently teaching at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, CT.
Priya Pinjani Perwani practices architecture education, urban research, and community engagement, and centres on all things that move between people and place. She navigates this expanded field of design to explore its political, social, and spatial possibilities. Priya is especially drawn to the everyday textures of city life and the ways design can make space for care, belonging and resistance.
Ammara Maqsood is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at University College London. Her research focuses on questions of intimate inspirations, class mobility and religious difference in Pakistan.
Palermo
Kate Stanworth is a London-based artist who uses photography to tell poignant stories exploring human resilience, identity and the search for belonging.
Stefania Artusi Khalfi is a Palermo-based artist and researcher whose practice explores themes of identity and gender, with a particular focus on the cyclical tensions between violence, identity and belonging.
Giulia Liberatore is Lecturer at Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies/Alwaleed Centre and Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She researches, teaches and writes about religion (Islam and Catholicism), migration and the politics of difference in Europe.
The project was made possible thanks to the collaborations of Stefano Edward Puvanendrarajah, Noemi Gaudesi, Boulallam Abderrahmane Mustafa, Sirus Nikkhoo Sari Ghieh, Tehseen Nisar, Abdulkarim Fabio Crisà, Helena Russo, and Cesare Tinì.
Nairobi
Leslie Fesenmyer is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research explores issues of belonging, mobility, religion, and the urban in Kenya and the United Kingdom.
Harun Anziya Litinyu is a Nairobi-based photographer, who loves art and telling stories through documentary photography that impacts the community in a positive way.
Ronnie Mugambi is a sound artist based in Nairobi. Working in both location and post-production audio, he has found a way to give voice to daily life, history and major events happening around his city and East Africa.
Julius Mwaniki has worked as a research assistant with renowned anthropologists from Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom for many years and is based in Nairobi.
Sarah Varney is the founder and executive producer of Fountain Productions, a nonprofit journalism project focused on the civil rights of women and girls, and has been a special health care correspondent for the PBS NewsHour since 2014 and contributing health reporter for NPR for two decades.