Kimberly is a doctoral candidate in the City and Regional Planning Department of Penn’s Weitzman’s School of Design. Her research interests include studying the lived experience of urban informality in the global south, focusing on the production and use of space to create and perpetuate the intersectional urban identities and inequalities of informality, poverty, and gender in India and Ghana.
Nii has over ten years of experience as an academic and activist focused on the use of theatre arts and participatory approaches that promote public health of disadvantaged populations. In the past, he has worked as a Research Assistant with the University of Ghana’s Regional Institute of Population on the Ghana Men’s Study, an integrated biological behavioural surveillance among men who have sex with men. He has also worked with prison inmates, female commercial sex workers, and adolescents, at a school for the Deaf.
He has also used creative and participatory approaches to data collection and analysis inspired by Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal’s Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed to study modern slavery and safeguarding in James Town. Nii has a BA in Fine Arts and a MPhil in African Studies from the University of Ghana, Legon. Nii brings his strong interdisciplinary training in the arts and social sciences methodologies to this project’s focus on women living informally.
Amitha Anna James
Amitha is an MPhil graduate from St. Teresa’s College, Kerala, India. She did her Masters in English Language and Literature from School of Letters, Mahatma Gandhi University. Fascinated by contemporary theory and having extensive experience volunteering, Amitha has always explored her interests outside the classroom learning. Gender politics in popular culture is a topic she has returned to from time to time to do her academic research on. As a student of language, the different aspects of linguistics is something she is always excited about.