Henning Melber studied Political Sciences (PhD 1980) and Sociology (Habilitation in Development Studies 1992). He was Director of The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit in Windhoek (1992-2000), Research Director of the Nordic Africa Institute (2000-2006) and Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation (2006-2012), both in Uppsala. He is Extraordinary Professor at the Department of Political Sciences/University of Pretoria and at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies/University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, Associate with The Nordic Africa Institute and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Commonwealth Studies/School for Advanced Study of the University of London. He was President of The European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) from 2017 to 2023.

Gabriele Griffin is Professor of Gender Research at the Centre for Gender Research. She is coordinator of the Swedish Research Council-funded PhD School on ‘Gender, Humanities, and Digital Cultures’ (2023-2028), and the Swedish coordinator of the SIDA-funded collaborative research and training program on ‘Mainstreaming Gender’, a collaboration involving Dr Nadine Lake (University of the Free State) and Prof Marta Mendonca of Eduardo Mondlane University (2017-2025), Maputo. Her research focuses on women in research and innovation, gender and technology, female entrepreneurs, women's cultural production, feminist research methodologies, non-normative identities, and higher education and disciplinisation. Recent publications include Griffin, G., ed. (2022) Gender Inequalities in Tech-driven Research and Innovation: Living the Contradiction. Bristol: Bristol University Press; Griffin, G. (2022)”’Making’ and ‘Doing’ Context: Sharing in an all-female co-working hub.” In Women and Global Entrepreneurship: Contextualising Everyday Experiences, Maura McAdam, James Cunningham (eds.) New York: Routledge. 153-167; Griffin, G., Wennerström, E., Foka, A. (2023) ‘AI and Swedish Heritage Organisations: challenges and opportunities.’ AI & Society: The Journal of Human-Centred Systems and Machine Intelligence. Springer Nature. Epub ahead of print.

Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni is currently Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South with Emphasis on Africa and Vice-Dean of Research in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth in Germany; Professor Extraordinarius in the Department of Leadership and Transformation  (DLT) in the Principal & Vice-Chancellor’s Office at the University of South Africa (UNISA); Professor Extraordinarius at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of Free State (UFS) in South Africa; Honorary Professor in the School of Education (Education & Development Studies) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa; Research Associate at the Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in South Africa; Research Associate at the Department of Political Science at the University of Pretoria (UP) in South Africa; and Research Associate at The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies at The Open University in the United Kingdom. Professor Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a prolific scholar with a hundred publications including more than 20 books to his name. His latest publications include Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (Routledge, 2018); Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa: Turning Over A New Leaf (Routledge, 2020); Marxism and Decolonization in the 21^st Century: Living Theories and True Ideas (Routledge, 2022) co-edited with Morgan Ndlovu; and Beyond Coloniality of Internationalism: Reworlding the World from the Global South (CODESRIA Book Series-in press).