Dr. Clarence M. Batan is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology, and former Research Director of the Research Center for Culture, Education, and Social Issues at the University of Santo Tomas, Philippines. He was President of the Philippine Sociological Society (2017–2018) and Vice President for Asia in the Research Committee on the Sociology of Youth (RC34) (2014–2018) of the International Sociological Association. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies, and author of two books in Filipino, book chapters, and journal articles. Having completed his graduate studies in North America (including a PhD in Sociology at Dalhousie University in Canada and an international research fellowship at Brown University in USA) he has been challenged through his involvement in the Global South Youth Studies project to center the works of Southeast Asian theorists and Filipino academics in his sociological research.

Dr. Adam Cooper is a Senior Research Specialist in the Inclusive Economic Development programme of the Human Sciences Research Council. He works on the Sociologies of Youth and Education. He is the author of Dialogue in Places of Learning: Youth Amplified from South Africa, a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies and co-author of Studying While Black: race, education and emancipation in South African universities. He is also a Research Associate at Nelson Mandela University, Research Chair for Youth Unemployment, Employability and Empowerment. Before taking up his position at the HSRC he was an NRF postdoc based at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Cambridge.

Professor James E. Côté is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and regularly contributes to three fields of research: identity studies, youth studies, and higher education studies. He was the founding editor of Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, served as President (2003-05) of the Society for Research on Identity Formation (SRIF), as well as the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on the Sociology of Youth (2010–2014). He has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of Adolescence since 2009. Dr. Côté’s most recent books include Youth Development in Identity Societies (2019), Identity Formation, Youth and Development: A Simplified Approach (2016), and Youth Studies: Fundamental Issues and Debates (2014). He is currently coediting the second edition of the Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Higher Education with Sarah Pickard and coauthoring Youth Studies: An Advanced Introduction with Howard Williamson.

Professor Alan France was born in the United Kingdom and migrated to New Zealand in 2010. He is a professor of sociology in Te Pokapū Pūtaiao Pāpori (School of Social Sciences) at Te Whare Wānanga o Tāmaki Makaurau (the University of Auckland) in Aotearoa, New Zealand. His main research interests are concerned with youth and the youth question. His most recent books are Understanding Youth in the Global Economic Crisis (2016 ); Youth and Social Class: Enduring Inequality in the UK, Australia and New Zealand (2018) and Youth Sociology (2020 Macmillan Publishing). For him Southern Theory has been ignored in how we understand the lives of young people around the globe. Youth studies has to acknowledge this and has a responsibility to seek out new ways of working that value other diverse perspectives. This now drives much of his own work and being involved in this project has been a pleasure and privilege.

Dr. Terri-Ann Gilbert-Roberts is a Jamaican regionalist with an interest in the politics of development, particularly where governance, regionalism, and youth development intersect. She is a Fellow at the University of the West Indies (UWI), where she chairs the “50/50 Youth” Research Cluster established to support evidence-based youth work and policymaking in the Caribbean. She is the author of The Politics of Integration: Caribbean Sovereignty Revisited (Ian Randle, 2013) and Editor of “Youthscapes of Development in the Caribbean and Latin America,” a 2014 Special Issue of the Journal of Social and Economic Studies (63:3&4). She enjoys researching citizen participation in decision making, peacebuilding, and public accountability.

Professor Siri Hettige , based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, has been engaged in sociological research on youth for nearly three decades and has published widely on related themes. His other areas of research include education, social policy, health policy, ethnic conflict, labor migration, sustainable development, urbanization, and urban planning. Currently he’s affiliated to the Department of Sociology, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he was Chair of Sociology for over two decades, until 2015. He is also a member of the Working Committee on Social Sciences at the National Science Foundation, Sri Lanka. Several visiting research and teaching appointments were held by him at a number of universities in a number of other countries that included Australia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, the United States, Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands. In Australia he held a teaching appointment at RMIT University in Melbourne in the Department of Global, Urban and Social Studies. Hettige is glad to be part of this youth studies handbook since it brings together diverse perspectives on the subject from different regions of the Global South.

Professor Ana Miranda is the Academic Director of the Youth Research Program and a professor of Master of Youth Studies at FLACSO, Argentina. She is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and a professor at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). She holds a degree in Sociology from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in social science from FLACSO. Her research and teaching are related to youth, education, inequality, and labor. Since 1998, she has worked on the design of panels for the development of longitudinal studies She has participated in academic cooperation projects with many universities, governments, and UN organizations. She has published eight books, the most recent being Youth, Inequality & Social Change in the Global South, edited with Hernan Cuervo of the University of Melbourne. In July 2018 she was elected Deputy President of RC 34 of the International Sociology Association (ISA) for the period 2018–2022.

Professor Pam Nilan (retired) holds the honorary position of Conjoint Professor in Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is an Australian of Irish origins, with convict ancestors. Throughout a long career, her research focus has been primarily on youth in the Asia Pacific region, especially in Indonesia, Australia, Fiji, and Vietnam. Her motivation for involvement in The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies is to help expand beyond the less than satisfactory epistemological boundaries of Northern frameworks for studying youth. That motivation builds on her previous pioneering work with Carles Feixa and Carmen Leccardi that offered critical appraisal of the idea of “global” youth, and showcased innovative youth studies from countries beyond the Northern Metropole, conducted by in-country researchers.

Dr. Joschka Philipps is a political sociologist at the University of Basel, a senior researcher at the Swiss Peace Foundation, and a lecturer in sociology, political science, and African studies in Basel, Switzerland. His research has focused on urban youth and political protest formations in Conakry, Guinea and Kampala, Uganda, and has been published by the Review of African Political Economy, Africa Spectrum, and the Journal of Youth Studies. His book Ambivalent Rage. Youth Gangs and Urban Protest in Conakry, Guinea (Editions L’Harmattan, 2013) won the Junior Researcher Award by the Association for African Studies in Germany. Philipps’ current research concentrates on conspiracy theories in a postcolonial context, disruptive events and political change, and methodological problems of “researching the unfamiliar,” (i.e., exploring social realities across cultural and generational contexts).

Dr. Paul Ugor is an associate professor in the Department of English at Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois. His research interests are in Anglophone world literatures, postcolonial studies, cultural theory, new media cultures; and modern African literatures and cultures. He is the author of Nollywood: Popular Culture and Narratives of Youth Struggles in Nigeria (2016). Dr Ugor has also coedited several collections including, African Youth Cultures in the Age of Globalization: Challenges, Agency and Resistance (2015/2017); “Contemporary Youth Cultures in Africa,” Special Issue of Postcolonial Text. Vol. 8, No 3–4, 2013; and “Youth, Cultural Politics and New Social Spaces in an Era of Globalization,” Special Issue of Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 31:4 (2009). His research and teaching interests are concerned with emerging trends in global politics, economy, communication technologies, cultural/textual representations, and everyday life, especially in the postcolonial world.