Editorial Collective

Ian M. Cook

Ian loves reading interesting things, especially anthropology, but he hates reading interesting things written in terrible ways. He suspects that some anthropological writing is so bad because anthropologists forgot how to speak. He aims to help them remember through podcasting. Otherwise he is a scholar of India & urban cultures and likes to think a lot about rhythm and sound.

Sara Jormakka

Sara is a Master of Theology (with English as a side dish) who currently works in IT and dreams of writing a dissertation on video games some day. She is passionate about communication, art and all kinds of media, and on her spare time she writes comics. At Allegra, her lot is to make sure everything runs smoothly on the website.

Agathe Mora

Agathe has been serving as Editor-in-Chief since August 2018. An anthropologist of legal and political processes, she works with legal professionals in Kosovo, the EU and the UN and writes about the bureaucratisation of human rights, transitional justice and property restitution. She is a lecturer in Social Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex.

Jon Schubert

Jon joined Allegra in 2017, as a platform to push back against stifling hierarchies, theoretical grandstanding, and the fast-food scholarship of neoliberal academia. He is now part of the team taking care of thematic threads. A lapsed historian, erstwhile risk forecaster, and precariously employed academic nomad, he continues to grapple with the big questions of inequality, power, infrastructures, pasts and futures, and the possibility of change, mainly through the perspective of urban Angola and Mozambique.

Julie Billaud

Julie is Allegra’s co-founder. Her academic interests include humanitarianism, human rights, global justice and international governance. After some nomadic wanderings in Kabul, Bangkok, Paris, Berlin, London and Brighton, she is now living in Geneva where she teaches anthropology, writes about bureaucracy and studies humanitarians and other do-gooders.

Faduma Abukar Mursal

Faduma joined Allegra in 2023. Her academic research interests include the militarization of urban spaces, global governance, social justice, political violence, moral economies and Eastern Africa.

Till Mostowlansky

Till joined Allegra’s Editorial collective in 2024. He is an anthropologist researching humanitarianism, infrastructure, and Islam.

Çiçek İlengiz

Çiçek joined Allegra in 2024. She particularly enjoys fluctuating between anthropology and history in her explorations of radical political imaginations, cultures of healing and heritage regimes. Her writings engage with commemoration, mourning, world heritage and afterlives. She is still precariously postdocing, nowadays in Berlin.

Gennady Kurushin

Professional with broad experience in graphic and web design as well as digital marketing. Completed two Master’s degrees. Passionate about popularising scientific knowledge and working with others to bring creative ideas to life. Visit portfolio here: cobalt.fi.

Siepke van Keulen

Since November 2020, Siepke has been the editorial assistant of the Allegra team. She studied Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, and International Relations and Diplomacy. Her main interests are in transcultural conflict, and specifically in conflict prevention based on reparations through museum cooperation and art exchange.

Kanchi Ganatra

Kanchi first got interested in researching conflicts, borderlands and migration during her visit to Israel and Palestine in 2016. A year later, she migrated to Estonia from her home city, Mumbai.  As an anthropology student at Tallinn University she thinks that she has seen the value of unmediated experience – a core promise of anthropology – and is now writing her Masters thesis about the lives of male migrants and refugee management in Greece.

Elise Hjalmarson

Elise Hjalmarson is a writer, educator, and organiser working at the intersection of migration, labour, gender, and race in and beyond Latin America. She is co-founder of Radical Action with Migrants in Agriculture, a migrant justice collective based in the Okanagan on unceded Syilx territory in Canada. Lately Elise can be found at a candle-lit desk slogging away at her PhD thesis, editing book reviews for Allegra, and dreaming of a world without borders.

Dana McKelvey

Djanet Rose Costantini

Djanet joined Allegra in 2024. She is currently completing a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology in Basel, where she enjoys addressing the topics of mobility and immobility, belonging, human rights, agency and resistance. In addition, she likes to engage with sensory filmographic ethnography and imaginative storytelling.