Deborah Pellow is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. Her research program is grounded in the roles and relationships enacted by individuals in the urban arena and plural society, under conditions of social change. Most of her work has involved the conception, use, and social reproduction of identity and through it access to power. Professor Pellow’s primary geographic area of interest has been West Africa, primarily Ghana; she has done research in Chicago and Shanghai, China.  Her fieldwork in Africa and Chicago has dealt with issues of identity by “strangers” or “marginals” (women, members of sub-cultures) in a “strange” (urban) context. Picking up on her interest in micro-politics, in 2005 she began a new project on the involvement of the Dagomba educated elite living in the capital of Ghana in chieftaincy and destabilization in their hometown area in northern Ghana. She spent 6 months doing fi eldwork with support from a Fulbright Senior Research Grant. Professor Pellow is a founding member and director of the Space and Place Initiative based in the Global Affairs Institute and a faculty member in Maxwell’s Master of Social Science program.