Christine Adongo is currently an early stage researcher doing PhD at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS – Paris), and a member of Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporaire (IIAC). She attained both her bachelors and Masters degrees in Environmental science at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya. Broadly, her research interests encompass environment, natural resources, local landscapes, pastoral socio-ecological transition and livelihoods. More specifically, she has worked on natural resources conservation and livelihoods, focusing on the Kenya coastal sacred Kaya forests, and pastoral futures in northern Kenya in so far as climate change adaptation and WASH management at the local level in concerned. Her most work focuses on ‘green’ projects’ implementation (geothermal energy project in Kenya) and their socio-ecological and livelihood implications on the resilience of local pastoral landscape. Christine will use the mobility funds from GDR as a post-doctoral undertaking, to advance her fieldwork and facilitate the dissemination of her work on the contested futures of geothermal in the greater Olkaria geothermal area in Kenya’s rift valley.

Agro-pastoral Maasai communities now living with tourism live close to Ol Doinyo Lengai (OLD), an active stratovolcano located in the East African Rift in northern Tanzania. The renewed activity of the volcano raises the question of crisis management strategies to reduce the impacts of a future eruption. For the Maasai communities, Ol Doinyo Lengai is the home of the creator God Engai. What is the relationship between the populations and a volcano that is synonymous with threat? The research is part of a broader questioning of “modern or western” risk management vs traditional management

Sonia Harmand is an archaeologist and the director of the Mission Préhistorique au Kenya / West Turkana Archaeological Project in Kenya. Her research focuses on reconstructing the skills and cognition of the earliest tool-making hominins in Africa, and particularly pre-Homo species.

She is also interested in biomechanics involved in stone tool production, as well as primate archaeology.

Benoit Hazard is working on anthropo-scenes in Africa. Research are based on two ethnographic sets:

1. the invention of “modern water” in the wells system of pastoralists groups (Chalbi Desert, North Kenya);
2. the study of the socio-ecological changes due the energy transition in the Central Valley of the Kenyan Rift.

I have been conducting ethnographic research in the lower Omo region (Debub Omo Zone, Ethiopia) since 2016 in the Muni (Mursi) society and in the regional urban centers. Now a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, I am writing a monography about the town of Jinka as a hub for the production of images and knowledge about “cultural others” and for activities of culture brokerage.

Volcanic risk assessment and mapping (hazards, vulnerability, exposure), Lengaï volcano, RETEX on volcanic crises, prevention tools (education, volcano and tsunami evacuation plans), volcanography and natural risk management lessons, cartography/GIS, spatial analysis.