Mirjam de Bruijn is Professor of Contemporary History and Anthropology of Africa, at Leiden University (The Netherlands). As an anthropologist she has done much interdisciplinary research on the interrelationship between agency, marginality, mobility, communication and technology in West and Central Africa, especially Cameroon, Chad and Mali, leading major research projects on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). In this connection she published numerous articles in scholarly journals and edited the volumes "The Social Life of Connectivity in Africa" (with Rijk van Dijk, Palgrave Mac Millan 2012) and "Side@Ways: Marginality and Communication in Africa" (with Inge Brinkman and Francis Nyamnjoh, ASC Leiden and Langaa 2013).