6. Negotiating fieldwork challenges

Bonnie Hewlett is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, US. She has conducted research in Gabon and the Republic of Congo on infectious diseases, in the Central African Republic on women’s history and adolescent development, and more recently, in Ethiopia on the health and experiences of Ethiopian orphans, and birth mothers/ fathers’ reasons for relinquishment and abandonment.

Bruce Rawlings is a developmental, cross-cultural and comparative psychologist, based at Durham University, UK. He holds a PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology from the same university. His work examines cognitive and cultural influences on innovation, creativity, and tool use in children and great apes. He focuses on children across geographically and culturally diverse populations to understand what makes humans so unique. He also works to improve the validity of cross-cultural experiments

Camila Scaff earned her PhD in Cognitive Sciences from the École Normale Supérieure–Paris Diderot University (now Université Paris Cité), France. She holds split-time postdoctoral research fellowships with the Human Ecology Group at the University of Zurich’s Institute of Evolutionary Medicine and the Language Acquisition Across Cultures group at the École Normale Supérieure’s Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistiques (LSCP) in Paris. Her research explores how socio-ecological environments shape human cognitive and linguistic variation.

Monika Abels is Associate Professor of Child Development at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. As a cross-cultural developmental psychologist, she has extensive fieldwork experience in India, mainly in rural areas in North India and more recently with the Hadza in Tanzania. Her research focuses on infants’ and children’s everyday experiences and socio-emotional development, as well as their caregivers’ behaviors and beliefs. Her approach is eco cultural and her methods frequently include observations and interviews.

Xiaojie Tian holds a PhD in Area Studies and is currently Associate Professor at the Institute of Health and Sport Sciences at University of Tsukuba, Japan. She has conducted anthropological research on pastoralist Maasai communities in Southern Kenya over the past decade. She integrates research methods from different disciplines focusing on ethnobiological knowledge, child learning and development, childhood play and work, and physical culture. Her recent publication includes Maasai Childhood: The Rhythm of Learning in Daily Work and Play Routines.

Feryl Badiani is a final year PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and is also affiliated with the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University of London, UK. Her thesis explores Hinduism and the cultural evolutionary explanations as to why it is a popular polytheistic religion. She focuses on two Indo-linguistic communities: Gujarats and Maharashtrians, as a member of both those communities. Her work looks at expanding theories within cognitive science of religion so that they take into account non-western realities.

Nokwanda (Kwanda) Ndlovu is a doctoral candidate in Counseling Psychology at Purdue University and she is from Durban, South Africa. Her passion lies in decolonized community work where she collaborates with community-based organizations particularly in South Africa, and leverages community assets and strengths to address issues faced by vulnerable children and families. Through that lens, Kwanda’s past research has looked into Indigenous parenting values, traditions, and mores within the context of South Africa. Most recently, Kwanda has been studying systems of healing as conceptualized by traditional healers within the South African context.

Nachita Rosun is a postdoctoral researcher in Psychology at Oxford Brookes University, UK, and an honorary research fellow at the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University of London. Nachita is interested in processes of cultural shift through changing social norms and religious beliefs. Her research uses theories from cultural evolution and norm psychology to explain how these changes are interlinked with socioecology and cultural transmission mechanisms.

Seth Oppong was Professor of Work and Cultural Psychology at the University of Botswana. During his prolific career, he focused on diverse research areas, including occupational health psychology, traffic psychology, psychological testing, the history of psychology, theoretical and philosophical psychology, meta-science with respect to psychological science, Indigenous and African psychology, and decolonizing early childhood development programming.