Professor Sharlene Swartz is a nationally rated South African researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council, an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Fort Hare and a former adjunct associate professor of Sociology at the University of Cape Town. She holds undergraduate degrees in philosophy and science from South African universities (Wits and Zululand respectively), a master’s degree in education from Harvard University, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her expertise and current research centers on the just inclusion of youth in a transforming society. She has an extensive publication record that includes the books Studying While Black: Race, Education and Emancipation in South African Universities (2018); Another Country: Everyday Social Restitution (2016); Youth Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging (2013); Ikasi: The Moral Ecology of South Africa’s Township Youth (2009); and Teenage Tata: Voices of Young Fathers in South Africa (2009). She is also the current President of the Sociology of Youth Research Committee of the International Sociological Association.

Dr. Adam Cooper is a Senior Research Specialist in the Inclusive Economic Development programme of the Human Sciences Research Council. He works on the Sociologies of Youth and Education. He is the author of Dialogue in Places of Learning: Youth Amplified from South Africa, a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies and co-author of Studying While Black: race, education and emancipation in South African universities. He is also a Research Associate at Nelson Mandela University, Research Chair for Youth Unemployment, Employability and Empowerment. Before taking up his position at the HSRC he was an NRF postdoc based at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Clarence M. Batan is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology, and former Research Director of the Research Center for Culture, Education, and Social Issues at the University of Santo Tomas, Philippines. He was President of the Philippine Sociological Society (2017–2018) and Vice President for Asia in the Research Committee on the Sociology of Youth (RC34) (2014–2018) of the International Sociological Association. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies, and author of two books in Filipino, book chapters, and journal articles. Having completed his graduate studies in North America (including a PhD in Sociology at Dalhousie University in Canada and an international research fellowship at Brown University in USA) he has been challenged through his involvement in the Global South Youth Studies project to center the works of Southeast Asian theorists and Filipino academics in his sociological research.

Dr. Laura Kropff Causa is an Independent researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council and a professor at the National University of Río Negro (Argentina) where she is the Director of the Undergraduate Program in Anthropology. She works on anthropology of youth, ethnic studies, political anthropology and historical anthropology focusing in North-Patagonia. She has published in journals from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and the United States, and is editor of Mapuche Theatre: Dreams, Memory and Politics and co-editor of The Land of Others: The Territorial Dimension of indigenous Genocide in Río Negro, and The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies. She was also a Fulbright Scholar at New York University (2006).