Catherine Alexander is Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has carried out fieldwork in Turkey, Britain and Kazakhstan, and has published on domestic space and cities. Most of her research has been engaged with changing relationships between state, society and market including privatisation, property relations and welfare and the third sector.

Victor Buchli is Reader in Material Culture in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. His research interests focus on the material culture of socialism and post-socialism, modernist architecture and urbanism in Russia and Kazakhstan, the archaeology of the recent past, and theoretical understandings of material culture and materiality.

Caroline Humphrey is Professor of Collaborative Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She has worked extensively in Russia, Mongolia, and North-West China, and also more briefly in Nepal and India. She has published on economic change, ritual and religion, and her current interests concern socialist/post-socialist urban cultures in China and Russia.