Experts on countries of origin by country

Andrea S. Allen research has addressed matters of race, sexuality, gender, violence, and religion in Brazil and the African Diaspora. Her first book Violence and Desire in Brazilian Lesbian Relationships (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) focused on the experiences of lesbian women in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Dr. Allen is currently working on a second book project about LGBT evangelical Brazilians, race, religious identity, and sexual subjectivity.

Goal-focused, strategic planner, and passionate leader with extensive experience implementing effective, global strategies to stabilize communities through capacity building, promoting human rights and democratization, and amplifying the value of communication. Skilled in collaborating with all members of the organization to build bridges across ideological divides, trusted to tailor language, tone, style, and format to match the audience. Passionate educator with two years’ experience as a High School Principal. Proactively pursues the development and execution of ethical leadership, personnel management, and clear research/discovery goals with comprehensive plans delivering measurable impact to in-house operations. 

An accomplished expert in Lebanese, Levantine, and MENA law, politics, and culture, Dr. Isaac Andakian brings extensive experience and a proven track record in political advisory roles. From 2001 to 2009, Dr. Andakian served as a trusted senior political adviser to two members of the Lebanese Parliament and a minister in the Lebanese cabinet. Over nine years, he counseled the Armenian Orthodox Community Court of Lebanon and the Municipality of the City of Anjar, Lebanon, from 2003 to 2012.

During Dr. Andakian’s tenure as an Arabic Litigation… Read more

Dr. Danica Anderson is a US-based international social scientist, researcher, and forensic counselor (criminal justice specialist) with a doctorate in clinical psychology. Dr. Anderson is a member of the UNESCO scientific and education CID council and of the International Criminal Court, a Psycho-social Victim Gender Expert for trauma with war crimes and war crimes survivors. She is a trauma clinician who has traveled the world bearing witness to―and researching how to heal transgenerational trauma and continues to make crisis responses while addressing the needs of immigrants and refugees during and in the aftermath of natural disasters and wars. Trauma response and social science and research fieldwork occurred in Afghanistan, Haiti, India, Sri Lanka, and many conflict-ridden regions and war regions.

Dr. Anderson's international trauma work occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa for the International Criminal Court and the United Nations World Food Program in Sudan. In former Yugoslavia, Bosnia Herzegovina, her study and clinically informed trauma for over two decades provided an archive of information on women's transgenerational trauma for war and war crimes survivors involving asylum and visas. Dr. Anderson worked with Mexico's National Human Rights, Mexico City, and the… Read more

Nicola Bulled is a public health anthropologist. Her scholarship interrogates health inequalities, using mixed methods to examine the intersection of biology with the social to offer multi-level perspectives on public health programming, service delivery, and policy. Her specific fields of interest include HIV, infectious diseases, disease prevention technologies, health communication, and community collaboration.  She has engaged in research and public health programming in South Africa, Lesotho, Liberia, Greece, and the United States. Her research has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Fulbright IIE. 

An accomplished nonprofit leader, educator, and human rights advocate with over 15 years of experience driving community development, public health initiatives, and social justice programs across Belize and the United States. Specializes in behavior change communication, human rights documentation, sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR), anti-trafficking coordination, and youth empowerment. A certified primary educator with experience in both Belize and the U.S. educational systems, with a strong background in curriculum development, multigrade instruction, and leadership within multicultural settings. Skilled in organizational governance, strategic planning, research methodologies, and advocacy for marginalized groups. Recognized for bridging grassroots mobilization with policy-level impact, and for fostering collaboration among government, civil society organizations, and international agencies.

Dr. Kristen Drybread is an anthropologist specializing in Latin American studies; political and legal anthropology; studies of race, gender and sexuality; and international prison studies. She is currently a graduate writing specialist and lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Dr. Drybread earned her Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University and has held postdoctoral research appointments at the Center for the Study of Violence at the University of São Paulo and in the Drugs, Security, and Democracy Program of the Social Science Research Council. She has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Brazilian prisons, courts, drug treatment centers, and children’s shelters. Her research addresses topics including gender-based violence, political corruption and white collar crime, drug trafficking and treatment, children’s rights, and prison administration. 

Kendra Dupuy is a social science researcher and Assistant Professor of African politics. She has expertise with quantitative & qualitative research on energy, climate change, environment, natural resource management, democracy, human rights, civil society, education, and forced migration. She is a certified project manager, technical writer, and program & project evaluator. She has has deep expertise in the African region and specifically on countries in West Africa, East Africa, southern Africa, and the DR Congo.

Dr. Daanish Faruqi is a Visiting Researcher at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.  A scholar of migration and mobility in the Middle East and North Africa, he has leveraged his expertise both in academia and in international development. At Georgetown he researches democracy promotion and conflict resolution through transnational religious humanitarianism. Relying on fieldwork with transnational humanitarian NGOS immediately following the 2023 Syrian/Turkish earthquake, his latest writing deals with the viability of religious humanitarianism in effectively managing refugee crises. He has a forthcoming interview with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on this project and its potential for peace building.

He completed his Ph.D. from Duke University, where he wrote his dissertation on the role of Syrian Sufi religious scholars in joining the 2011 uprising against Bashar al-Assad. Through several years of ethnographic and historical fieldwork in Morocco, Turkey, and Jordan, conducting hundreds of Arabic-language interviews, his work revealed the role of 19th century migration from North Africa to Damascus in informing contemporary… Read more

Patricia Foxen is a cultural anthropologist with 30 years of experience working in academic, policy and program contexts with Latino immigrant and refugee populations in the U.S. and Canada. She has written extensively about Central American migration and indigenous communities and is the author of the book In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities (Vanderbilt University Press, 2008; updated edition, 2020), as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles and major reports.  Dr. Foxen served for 14 years as Deputy Director of Research at UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza), the largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., where she oversaw data-driven policy-oriented research, directed and published community-based research on the integration and well-being of Latino youth and families, and communicated findings to external audiences such as policy makers, media outlets, practitioners and universities. Dr. Foxen has taught at Vanderbilt University and the University of Toronto, has been a visiting fellow at Yale University and American University, and is a frequent guest lecturer. She has served on boards and advisory bodies including the Population Reference Bureau, Child Trends Hispanic Institute Advisory Council, the… Read more

Dr. Ginzburg is a practicing medical anthropologist and public health professional, with a focus on mental health and health equity research. She has published research on mental health, stigma, syndemics, chronic illness, obesity, food insecurity, environmental health, and community-based participatory research.

Daniel M. Goldstein is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He is the author or co-author of four ethnographies and numerous articles based on his research in Bolivia and the United States. His areas of interest include the anthropology of politics and law, security, violence, immigration, and urban life. Daniel retired from academia in 2018 to pursue a career as a novelist, but he remains involved in the study of Latin American political and social life.

Dr Imam brings more than two decades of experience in mixed methods international social science practice, research, and teaching around the world, focusing on East and West Africa, South Asia, USA, and Central Asia. Her interests involve research, development, and instruction on advanced issues of human rights, international conventions on human, civil, and political rights, and against torture; police service, judicial and quasi-judicial institutions, and persecution; grievance redressal arrangements; gender analysis, gender equality, gender-based violence, forced marriages, and sexual abuse; child abuse, child marriages, and violence against children; climate-related issues; and more. She has written books and scholarly articles about public administration, employing quantitative data and qualitative streams of historical changes in socioeconomic, judicial, political, and administrative institutions.

Her work employs innovative research methodologies, focusing on getting to the crux of socio-cultural and institutional situations to deliver efficient solutions that take into account complex dynamics involving human rights, child rights, gender equality, sustainability, and other such standards, in diverse socio-political contexts.

Michelle Johnson is Associate Dean of Faculty for the Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University. A cultural anthropologist specializing in religion and ritual in Africa and the contemporary African diaspora (i.e., Africans in Europe and the United States), she has conducted extensive fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau and with Guinean immigrants in Portugal. She has held grants from the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays), and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Religion in Africa, African Studies Review, Anthropology Quarterly, and Food and Foodways. She is author of Re-making Islam in African Portugal: Lisbon - Mecca - Bissau (Indiana University Press, 2020) and co-author (with Edmund "Ned" Searles) of Reciprocity Rules: Friendship and Compensation in Fieldwork Encounters (Lexington Books, 2021). She also provides expert testimony on asylum cases pertaining to West Africa and the contemporary African diaspora on topics such as genital cutting, forced marriage, and religious persecution and freedom. She teaches courses on cultural anthropology, the anthropology of religion, African Studies, and the life course and was… Read more

Dr. Maria Khwaja's work spans many years conducting research in urban Pakistan across ethnic and political lines with a focus on the violence faced by children who inherit conflict political spaces. She is currently an assistant professor at Salem State University and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Dr. Khwaja's areas of expertise include children's rights and children's agency, political violence by state and non-state actors, terrorism, stateless peoples and internally displaced refugees, schooling and education of children, gender, ethnic and religious discrimination, and military and political governance and violence. Dr. Khwaja is a published academic author with a chapter on her ethnographic work with adolescents published in 2013, a forthcoming article on research methodology in the Global South pending revisions, and several articles forthcoming.

The Expert is an internationally renowned and award-winning academic and consultant specialising in violence against women and minorities, and racial and religious persecution in the South Asia and Muslim majority countries.

Suzanne Menhem is a Professor and Researcher at the Lebanese University, Institute of Social Sciences, and an independent consultant with extensive expertise in Social Sciences, Anthropology, Demography, and Migration. She is renowned for her leadership in managing and implementing complex research projects and has made significant contributions to international initiatives such as Towards a Cultural Understanding of the Other (TOGETHER), Mediterranean Youth, NEETs and Women Advancing Skills, Employment, and Awareness in the Blue and Green Economy (MYSEA), and Viral Circulations and Social Dynamics. Her work has included conducting surveys, interviews, and focus groups to explore issues related to these projects, providing critical insights into global social dynamics. Dr. Menhem’s research interests encompass migration, gender equality, and socioeconomic development, with a strong focus on human rights-based inquiry. She has led key projects such as the National Study on Child Sexual Abuse in Lebanon, New Migrants in Lebanon, and The Syrian Youth Refugees’ Social and Economic Engagement in Lebanon, addressing the needs of vulnerable populations and tackling urgent social issues.As Head of the Department of Methodology, Epistemology, and Techniques at Lebanese University, Dr… Read more

Dr. Mariangela Mihai is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and WGSS at Western Washington University. She holds a PhD in anthropology and film from Cornell University and has served as a Postdoctoral and a Gender+ Initiative Fellow at Georgetown. With fieldwork experience spanning over a period of 12 years, Dr. Mihai looks at Indigenous resistance, borderland disputes, parastatal violence, as well as migration, refugee, and LGBTQIA+ issues on the India-Bangladesh-Myanmar-China borderlands, "the Balkans,” and the U.S. As a co-founder of Ethnocine, an Impact Filmmaking collective, she engages in collaborative films and grassroots human rights campaigns across transnational borders, addressing refugee, environmental, labor, LGBTQIA+, and healthcare issues. Dr. Mihai's NGO collaborations include the International Rescue Committee, United Way, and the Romanian Association Against AIDS.

Dr. Rahimi’s research and publication interests have covered diverse aspects of culture, health and subjectivity ranging from collective self-esteem and perception of racism to schizophrenia and culture, political subjectivity, radicalization, clinical trials, behavioral economics, and artificial intelligence.

Christian Reed is a Medical Anthropologist and Epidemiologist who specializes in sub-Saharan and East Africa. He has extensive research experience in Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia and speaks Portuguese, Swahili, Lunda-Ndembu, and Bemba. His single-authored book "Landscapes of Activism" pertains to pharmaceutical treatment access and HIV/AIDS activism with the matrilineal and Muslim tribes of northern Mozambique. He specializes in the social ramifications of infectious and communicable disease and rural and urban global health. Christian also studies religion with interests in traditional religion and healing, Pentecostalism, Catholicism, Santaria, Voodoo, and spirit possession.