Author Bio

Heider Tun Tun (Firm Rock, in Yucatec Maya) is an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History, Politics and Political Economy at Regis University. He is a first-generation Mayan scholar from Tahmek (place of the big hug), Mexico. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities, and his postdoctoral studies at…

Kaochi Pha (she/her) is a proud daughter of Hmong refugees. From a young age, she experienced the harsh realities growing up second-generation American while simultaneously navigating her identity as a Hmong woman. This shaped her political and social consciousness and led to her aspiration of supporting underrepresented communities professionally. She has worked in a variety…

Professor of Social Justice and International Studies in Education, Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta Dia Da Costa’s research analyzes the complex relationship of activism in contemporary India to state violence and development discourses. She is the author of Politicizing Creative Economy: Activism and a Hunger called Theatre (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and Development…

Janani is the co-founder of GRIN, a social enterprise that plays to connect children to nature. At the age of 12, Janani stepped out of mainstream education and started homeschooling with her family. In the journey of unlearning, she explored the philosophies of Nai Talim, J. Krishnamurthy, John Holt and many more. She spent the…

Alia Jeraj (she/they) is a Twin Cities based artist and educator. Though her background is in Western classical vocal music, Alia has shifted her musical focus towards folk musics, especially songs of Gujarat. She currently studies with Ritika Ganguly. In 2018 Alia was awarded a Next Step Fund to pursue research on the music and stories…

Jordan Starck is a scholar of race and racism, particularly the psychology of American anti-Blackness.

Gwendolyn Kirk is a linguistic anthropologist and the librarian for South and Southeast Asian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She researches language, power, and cultural production in South Asia including work on Punjabi and Urdu screen cultures of Pakistan.

Inez Steigerwald is a teacher and librarian in Washington, D.C. She has worked with students for over 10 years. She lived in Costa Rica for a time as a child and there she came to appreciate and love Latin American language, culture, and history. She began working with her mother, Ruby, to record the oral…

Kidiocus King-Carroll is an Assistant Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. King-Carroll received a PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is a member of the Black Midwest Initiative. His scholarship and writing has appeared in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, the Gender…

PhD Candidate and Doctoral Fellow, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Minnesota Sarah Saddler is a PhD Candidate and Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Minnesota. Her primary research examines the use of theatrical performance in the global workplace, with a focus on contemporary India. Her work,…

Antonádia Borges is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Brasilia. She does research along with popular ethnographers who dedicate their daily lives to theorize, understand and challenge capitalism and State capture. In places like Brazil and South Africa, it has been among young people but mainly women that she has acknowledged how…

Mona Bhan is the Ford Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University. She is a political and environmental anthropologist with research specializations in militarization, wars, and border subjectivities; ecology and infrastructure; and resource sovereignty and resistance politics in Kashmir. Over the past two decades, her work with  diverse communities who live…

Ponni Arasu hails from Chennai, India and now lives near the lagoon in Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka. Her work, in different places within the nation states of India and Sri Lanka, is an interwoven practice of making art – primarily embodied performance; studying and teaching history; thinking through, critiquing and working with the law;…

Katayoun is an Iranian-born, Minneapolis-based artist, educator, and independent curator. In her work, she often considers the sociopolitical systems that shape our perceptions of Self and Other, such as language, religion, gender, politics, and nationalist ideologies. Amjadi blurs these boundaries and creates an off-balance, hybrid style that is slightly acerbic and a little bit tongue-in-cheek. Her…

Abdul Aijaz is a human geographer researching politics and poetics of the environment in South Asia. He focuses on the cultural politics of water in the Indus Basin in Pakistan. He is currently teaching in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky.

Ruby Steigerwald is a mother, grandma, and teacher of English as a second (or third) language in Washington, DC. She has been working since the 1980’s for human and civil rights, especially for women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and African Americans. Ruby met the women of Co-Madres in 2005 when she traveled to El…

José Manuel Santillana Blanco is a queer feminist scholar, community organizer and storyteller. As a son of Mexican immigrant parents, José Manuel was politicized within the rural migrant farmworker landscapes of central California. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at UC Davis. Drawing on the work of Black, Latinx and…

MD, MPH student in Public Health Policy and Administration Ericka is a physician from Costa Rica who has dedicated her early career to the research of different illnesses in the field of Ears, Nose and Throat at the University of Minnesota Otolaryngology Department and the Ears, Nose and Throat Clinic of Hennepin County Medical Center…

Abhay Xaxa was born and brought up in Jashpur District of Chhattisgarh. An Adivasi Rights Activist and Sociologist by training, Abhay has worked with grassroots organisations, campaigns, NGO’s, media, and research institutions in different capacities on the issue of Adivasi land rights in central India. He is also the National Convenor at National Campaign on Adivasi…

Celina Su is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and a Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York. Her publications include Streetwise for Book Smarts: Grassroots Organizing and Education Reform in the Bronx (Cornell University Press), Landia (a book of poetry, Belladonna* Press), and pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, n+1, and elsewhere. Her…

Kamala Vasuki (Vasuki Jeyasankar) is a feminist activist and artist from the North and East of Sri Lanka. She has been part of women’s organizations and networks on the island since the late 1980s. She is a researcher, teacher and organizer on a range of issues of marginalised communities in the society where she lives. She organises on…

Anti-Black Racism in SWANA and Diaspora (English) Panelists Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the critically acclaimed How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction, and of This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the…

Imran Feroze is a Pakistan-based writer, poet, teacher, and activist. He researches themes of subjectivity and subjugation in modern Urdu poetry. He has taught Urdu literature at multiple institutions in Pakistan including Government College University in Lahore where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees with a roll of honor.

Sunil Shanker is a trained theatre practitioner, actor, director, and acting coach. He has worked with international artists from Germany, Sri Lanka, the UK, Italy, India, Romania, and Australia. Sunil  graduated from the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa), Karachi, Pakistan in 2009 with a major in acting. He has an innate understanding of how…

Roderick A. Ferguson is currently the William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California Press, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota…

Student, English literature, University of Minnesota Colin W. Wingate is student of English literature at the University of Minnesota. Drawing inspiration from Black Feminist Thought, Black Studies, Caribbean Thought, Black Queer studies, and Black Performance studies, his work looks at how Black peoples improvise their being (via writing/movement), to break with the genre of “human.”…

Koni Benson is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. Since 2006 she has been coproducing life histories of self-organization and unfolding political struggles of collective resistance against displacement and for access to land and public services (such as water, housing, and education) in…

Maria Cecilia comes from Mexico City and from stories of wandering ancestors. She comes from barbacoa on Sundays at the big house surrounded by fences crossed only by roosters and wild cats. In her research, Maria tries to dig holes on those walls, discover weak spots, climb ladders, or be a cat to peek, listen…

Madhumita Dutta is an assistant professor at the Ohio State University since 2017. Madhumita completed her PhD in Labour Geography from the Department of Geography, University of Durham, UK. Prior to her academic career, Madhumita had been an activist for over sixteen years in India, working with communities resisting takeover of their natural resources and…