Hanan Sabea is an Associate Professor and Sociology-Anthropology Graduate Program Advisor Editor-in-Chief of Cairo Papers in Social Science at The American University in Cairo (AUC). Here interests in anthropology started in Egypt, where she got her BA and MA at The American University in Cairo (AUC) working on issues related to development, resettlement of populations, and political economy of developing countries. After nine years of working in research and development projects in Egypt, she shifted interest to Sub-Saharan Africa, primarily East and southern Africa where she conducted research in Tanzania on questions related to land, labor and the making of histories. Her experiences in both North and sub-Saharan Africa were instrumental in defining one of my broader intellectual concerns, namely how the very category of Africa has been historically constructed as an object of knowledge and as a cultural-political entity subject to a long history of interventionist and extractive politics. This is intimately related to an overarching concern about knowledge and decolonization, where she asked how we produce knowledge, by whom, for what, when and where, and in what languages and forms.