Dan Banik is Associate Professor at the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) at the University of Oslo. He is research director of the Poverty and Development (PAD) programme, head of the academic network on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, and involved in the Human Rights and Extreme Poverty Project (HUREP). His latest book is Rights and Legal Empowerment in Eradicating Poverty.
	Dr. Shana Cohen has taught at the University of Sheffield since 2006. Before that, she held a research position at Sheffield Hallam University and taught in the sociology department and human services program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on social change and international development, and the impact of social services and the status of professional social service.
	Jean Comaroff (PhD, London School of Economics 1974) is Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, and in the Clinical Scholars Program, at the University of Chicago, USA. Her current research concerns problems of public order, state sovereignty and policing in postcolonial contexts, and the challenging relation of legitimacy to force.
	Sara R. Curran is Associate Professor of International Studies and Public Affairs, Director of the Center for Global Studies and Chair of the International Studies Program at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. She also serves as the Associate Director, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington, USA. Her research focuses on internal migration in developing countries, globalization, family demography, environment and population, and gender.  Recently, she edited a special issue of Globalizations addressing global food trade and the relationship to development & environment. This special issue was re-published by Routlege under the the title Global Governance of Food (2009). She is also the editor of a Handbook for Social Science Field Methods (Sage 2006) and the author of numerous articles.
	Bob Deacon is Professor of International Social Policy at University of Sheffield, UK. He was elected to the UK Academy of the Social Sciences in 2003. He is a world-leading analyst of the relationship between globalisation and social policy. He is the founding editor of two journals; Critical Social Policy and Global Social Policy and author/editor of 10 books including Global Social Policy and Governance (Sage). He has acted as an advisor or consultant to the World Bank, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UNDP, ILO, UNU-CRIS, ITC-ILO, UNDP-TCDC, UNESCO, WHO, EU, Council of Europe, and the ICWS.
	Sarah Elwood is an Associate Professor in the Geography Department at the University  of Washington. Her research bridges urban political geography and geographic information science, and integrates qualitative and participatory research methods with geospatial technologies such as GIS. She studies the changing activities and roles of community-based organizations and local social movement groups in efforts to ameliorate urban poverty, with particular focus on how the rising use of GIS and Internet-based mapping technologies by these groups alters the politics, practices and impacts of their efforts.
	Jan Froestad is Associate Professor at the Department of Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen, Norway. His main research interests are Norwegian care of the handicapped 1836-1936, personnel qualifications in the rehabilitation apparatus, and assessment of the user benefits of technical means of assistance.
	Dr. Siri Gloppen is professor of political science at the department of comparative politics of the University of Bergen, and Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway. Her work focuses on issues of democratisation and human rights, constitution-making, citizenship and participation, electoral processes, judicial reform, reconciliation and institutional change. She has experience from research, education, and policy analysis with particular focus on Eastern and Southern Africa (South Africa, Uganda, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia).
	Thorvald Gran is Professor at the Department of Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen, Norway. His main research interests include state and modernization, development policy, and international organizations.
	Maia Green is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK. Her work focuses on poverty, development and social institutions in East Africa. Her recent research takes international development institutions and practices as its starting point to examine processes of social and institutional transformation in Tanzania around health services, development participation and governance.
	Sam Hickey is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at the Institute for Development Policy and Management, University  of Manchester. His research focuses on the politics of development, including issues of citizenship and participation, NGOs and civil society, social protection and political analysis. He has co-edited three books, on Participation: From Tyranny to Transformation? (Zed, 2004), Can NGOs Make a Difference? (Zed) and Rights-based Approaches to Development (Kumarian, 2009), and published papers in leading development studies journals. He currently directs research into ‘Adverse Incorporation and Social Exclusion’ within the Chronic Poverty Research, and was a contributing author for the Chronic Poverty Report 2008.
	Lucy Jarosz is Associate Professor at the Department of Geography, University of Washington, USA. Her thematic research interests centre upon food and agriculture, rural poverty and inequality, and rural development and environmental change. Her current research investigates the material and political outcomes related to the discursive shift that once defined 'hunger' as a fundamental social problem to that of 'food security' as a new measurement and representation of poverty and food scarcity.
	Craig Jeffrey's research draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) to examine the means through which inequalities based upon class, caste, religion, and gender are being reproduced in postcolonial India. He has worked especially on how middle classes and young people in India strategize in relation to education, employment, and politics in order to perpetuate, contest, and sometimes transform entrenched social inequalities. In total, he has spent 38 months conducting field research in western UP since 1996, mainly working in Hindi and Urdu, and employing a mix of quantitative surveys, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation.
	Leif Jensen is Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography, at Penn State, USA. His research interests are found within three broad areas. The first is social stratification with emphasis on poverty, employment and underemployment, and informal work and other household economic survival strategies. Much of this work focuses on rural populations and rural-urban differences. His second area of interest is demography with special attention to migration and immigration. Finally, he is also interested in the sociology of economic development with a focus on Latin America.
	Professor Olav Korsnes is Head of the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen, Norway. His main research interests are comparative sociology of work and capitalism, class, power and social mobility. He is involved in several research projects on Norwegian industrial organisation and structures of qualification in an international comparative perspective.
	Victoria Lawson is Professor of Geography, her work is concerned with the social and economic effects of global economic restructuring in the Americas and with articulating critical alternative conceptions of processes of impoverishment.  Recent publications: Making Development Geography. (Hodder Arnold UK, 2007). She has recent and forthcoming publications in the following refereed journals Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Antipode, Social and Cultural Geography and the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. Lawson has been deeply involved in conference organization over many years.
	Desmond McNeill graduated in economics from the University of Cambridge in 1969, and received his Ph.D in economics at the University of London in 1988. He was Lecturer, and later Director of Overseas Services, at the Development Planning Unit, University College London from 1976-84; and Lecturer at the Department of Economics, University of Edinburgh from 1985-87. After moving to Norway he worked as a consultant and later adviser to NORAD. In the period 1992-2001 he was Director of the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo, and is now Research Professor.
	Alice O'Connor is Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University, USA. Her research and teaching interests lie in modern U.S. history. Her publications include Social Science for What?: Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up, and Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in 20th Century U.S. History.
	Thomas Pogge, having received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard, has published widely on Kant and in moral and political philosophy, including various books on Rawls and global justice. He is Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University and Research Director at the Oslo University Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature. He is also editor for social and political philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science. With support from the Australian Research Council, the BUPA Foundation and the European Commission, he currently heads a team effort toward developing a complement to the pharmaceutical patent regime that would improve access to advanced medicines for the poor worldwide (www.healthimpactfund.org).
	Asunción Lera St.Clair, philosopher and sociologist, is associate professor in sociology, Scientific Director of the Comparative Research Program on Poverty (CROP), one of the leading programs of the International Social Science Council (ISSC); co-scientific Director of the Bergen Summer Research School; and Vice-President of the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA). Her major research interests are on critical poverty studies, development ethics; sociology  of knowledge; ethics, values and global discourses;  climate change, environmental and global justice; and integrative perspectives on all these issues.
	David Wilson is Professor of Geography and Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His current research interests are in the areas of racialized poverty in cities,  discourse construction and the marginalization of populations, and contemporary neoliberal governance and its implications for cities and communities. His most current books are The Growth Machine Thesis: Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later (1999, SUNY), Inventing Black-On-Black Violence: Discourse, Space, and Representation (2005, Syracuse), and Cities and Race: America's New Black Ghetto (2007, Routledge).
	Kari Wærness is Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen, Norway. In the period 1989-1994 she lead the Norwegian Research Council's programme on studies of women in the social sciences. From 1999 to 2005 she was research director of the Centre for Women and Gender Research, at the University of Bergen. Her international focus includes the project on "Globalisation and Changes in the Cultures of Survival and Care: the Case of Ghana."