Olivia has lived and worked in Aotearoa New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Togo, Denmark and Australia and is currently based in Norwich, UK. Her research and teaching work have covered food sovereignty, post-colonial economies, contemporary gender relations, anthropology of emotions and affect, queer theory, feminist theory, decolonial theory, Pacific arts and cultures, Sufism in Britain, anthropology of the Caribbean and alternatives to capitalism. She has published research on Jamaica’s sugar economy, fashion and gender in Papua New Guinea and teaching intersectional and decolonial perspectives in the anthropology classroom alongside her recent monograph which focuses on the lives of market women in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea and the way the marketplace and the gifting economy which encompasses it shape and constrain women’s lives. Her background is English and Iranian but she was brought up in East Anglia in the South of England. She has long been interested in global and national politics, economics, geography, art, music and culture and she never planned to become an anthropologist.

Michael is a social anthropologist who has worked in Ethiopia, Nepal, Mexico, the U.S.A and the U.K. His first book, Out of Thin Air: Running Wisdom and Magic from Above the Clouds in Ethiopia (Bloomsbury, 2020) won the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association. He is interested in themes of endurance, self-tracking technologies and human enhancement. At the moment he is working on two projects. The first is an ethnography of human enhancement, focusing on the Enhanced Games, a new sporting competition that allows the use of performance enhancing drugs and technologies. He is interested in what the widespread use of such enhancements would mean for our idea of the human. The second is a study of asylum seeker integration in Ashington, Northumberland. Recently this has involved dusting off his football boots to play matches bringing together asylum seekers and locals.