Editorial Collective – Vol. 3

Our editorial collective evolves with each volume, inviting a rotating collaboration of agitators. To learn about the editorial collective active during the development of Volume 3, please see below. To learn about our current editorial collective, please visit our “About Us” page. 

Emina Bužinkić

Emina explores barefoot the intersections of refuge-ness, racist and classist formations, education-scapes, and political resistances in solidarity. Her work revolves around the critical understanding of border regimes through interplay of the police violence and refugees’ resistance to restrictions of freedom of movement. Emina’s research focuses on the inscriptions of regimes of criminalization of refugee youth in schooling and everyday life as a result of state surveillance and transnational securitization politics. Emina is deeply annoyed by capitalistic and neoliberal organization of the economy of life and finds it often unsettling to live in this world. She is committed to border-crossing and border-erasure while co-building coalitions transnationally. She is currently obtaining her Ph.D. in critical studies in education and human rights at the University of Minnesota in the United States. Her soul is nourished in creative resistance to evil and by the energies of the oceans.

Keavy McFadden

Drawing on urban geography, critical education studies, and feminist methodologies, Keavy’s Ph.D. research explores the centrality of education landscapes to imaginations, negotiations, and enactments of urban futures in Chicago. Her work asks: how do competing visions for Chicago’s future manifest and materialize in education infrastructure, political practices, and cultural representations? And why do education and educational practices take such a central role in the production of urban space and anticipatory politics in Chicago? Through her work, Keavy explores how narrow conceptions of education politics might be expanded beyond formal schooling to include alternative spaces of learning and knowledge production. In doing so, she argues that such spaces are key sites through which to understand urban politics more broadly in Chicago. In addition to her work on education, Keavy is interested in critical cartography, poetry, and questions of epistemic justice and solidarity.

Nithya Rajan

Nithya Rajan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research looks at the lives of refugee women in Delhi and the ways in which they survive and thrive. Questions of place, displacement and migration interest her. Nithya’s scholarship is shaped by the many places she has called home- Kerala, Delhi, Minneapolis. Nithya has Masters degrees from the Department of Social Work, Jamia Millia Islamia (Delhi) and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University. 

Richa Nagar

Richa writes, organizes, performs, shares, and builds in whatever languages, genres, and modes of learning are available to her. She has studied and worked in the US since 1989, but feels most alive when she is immersed in the thick honey of the everyday Urdu, Hindi, and Awadhi that she grew up with in the narrow lanes of Old Lucknow. An anti-disciplinary border-crosser, she believes in agitating stabilized ways of knowing and telling through collective creativity. Richa has learned from, and grown with, her colleagues-students-teachers at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where she has been a faculty member since 1997. She has worked intimately with the Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan and Parakh Theatre since their founding in the mid-2000s. To read more, click ‘Richa Nagar’ above.​

Samira Musleh

Samira Musleh is a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies with a minor in Feminist and Critical Sexuality Studies. Her research interest lies in the intersection(s) of gender, religion, and decoloniality. Samira’s current work focuses on unpaid labor, social and biological reproduction, non-capitalist economies, marriage and family laws, and Muslim societies as a way of questioning dominant notions of work and public/private dichotomies and conceptualizing equitable and non-exploitative conditions for domestic labor.

Sara Musaifer

Sara was raised along the shores of two archipelagoes, Bahrain and the Philippines, with songs and stories of moon-swallowing whales, mountains bursting into flames, and giants reigning over ancient plains. Focusing on K-12 education in Bahrain, Sara’s research crosses multiple borders to bring into question the intertwining histories and structural conditions producing a particular knowledge about the desired girl citizen-subject. Through girls’ enactments of political agency and imaginations of success, Sara also traces how they creatively engage with this knowledge and move past its rationales and scripts. In her other life, Sara is a teacher, writer, storyteller, and community-organizer.​

Sima Shakhsari

Sima’s work has been shaped by experiences of living through a revolution, a war, and displacement. Multiple itineraries, from Tehran to San Francisco, Oakland, Toronto, Houston, suburbs of Boston, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis have inspired Sima’s activism, poetry, and scholarship on immigration, queerness, refugeedom, and geopolitics. Sima’s commitment to social justice is informed by the relationship between people’s struggles transnationally. To learn more about Sima’s work, click ‘Sima Shakhsari’ above.