Sita Venkateswar is Director, International in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Senior Lecturer in the Social Anthropology programme at Massey University. Her ethnography Development and Ethnocide: Colonial Practices in the Andaman Islands is based on her PhD fieldwork in the Andaman Islands from 1989-1992. She has since been involved in research on child labour in Nepal and poverty and grassroots democracy in Kolkata, India. She is currently involved in exploring indigenous politics related to climate change as well as questions of displacement and belonging in relation to refugee resettlement in New Zealand and Europe.

Emma Hughes spent several years living in Egypt and working with women's rights groups in Egypt and East Africa where she was involved with development and advocacy projects addressing women's rights issues. In New Zealand she worked firstly for the Centre for Indigenous Governance and Development at Massey University, and currently as a research adviser. As a visiting research scholar at the American University in Cairo in 2008 she returned to Egypt to document the Nubian case.