Author Bio

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…

Zaynab Asmal is a History Access scholar at the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. She is currently completing her third comic book, this time for her masters in history, focusing on social science pedagogy in secondary schools. Outside of the university space, she can be found organising cosplay events at…

Beaudelaine Pierre est née et a grandi en Haïti. Son premier roman Testaman a remporté le premier prix du Concours de Roman en Créole du journal Bon Nouvèl. En 2012, elle a coédité avec Nataša Ďurovičová, How to Write an Earthquake, une anthologie sur le tremblement de terre du 12 janvier 2010 en Haïti. Pierre…

Hale is a lecturer and PhD candidate in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Situated between political theory and feminist philosophy, their research attends to the junctions and conflicts of nationalism, archives, forensic exhumation and narrative testimony to name political violence in Guatemala. They served as a gender and sexual violence…

The granddaughter of humble farmers with great love for their homelands, Indigenous educational researcher Elizabeth Sumida Huaman works to fulfill her ancestors’ visions for a beautiful world. She is Wanka/Quechua from the Mantaro Valley, Peru, and associate professor of Comparative and International Development Education at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her work focuses on…

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…

Abraham is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on sport, recreation and leisure in colonial Zimbabwe and Africa. Through his research, Abraham conceptualizes African modifications of boxing not just as a protest or resistance, but as a fundamental rejection of the aspirational ideals of western pastimes and games.…

PhD Candidate, Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota 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…

Emina writes, facilitates, and walks barefoot at the intersections of migration, transnational solidarities, and feminist pedagogies. She engages deeply with anti-militarist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist praxes, grounded in migrants’ daily struggles for freedom and in the epistemes of transnational and decolonial feminism, critical border activism, and collective knowledge production. She is part of AGITATE! Unsettling Knowledges…

Nithya is a writer and researcher from Kerala, India who now lives in San Diego, California. She has a PhD from the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, and currently works as postdoctoral fellow there. Her research looks at the lives of refugee women in Delhi and the ways…

Coral Bijoux, a South African artist, makes visible the work that she has engaged with for many years: observing, challenging, documenting life in a transitioning world amidst political and social upheavals, quiet moments and life experiences. An auto-ethnographic focus draws near her ideas and concepts through a visual language which is fecund with metaphor and…

Agléška Cohen-Rencountre is enrolled in Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. Their work is on Indigenous Urbanism, from a Critical Native Feminism perspective. They are a PhD Fellow in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. They grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota.

Ritika Ganguly, PhD., is a Minneapolis-based composer, anthropologist, and grants consultant, born and raised in New Delhi, India. Her consulting practice and artistic practice both strive for an equality based on difference, rather than on the similarity of things, people, and knowledges.  Ritika was commissioned as a composer by The Cedar Cultural Center in 2016,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Tia-Simone Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar. Working primarily with drawing, images, archives, and spaces, Gardner traces Blackness in landscapes, above and below the grounds surface. Ritual, disobedience, geography and geology are specters and recurring themes in her work. Gardner grew up in Fairfield, Alabama, across the street from Birmingham and learned…

On Stage: Siddharth Bharath, Jada Brown, Devleena Chatterjee, Esmae Heveron*, Rebecca Lieser*, Sara Musaifer, Richa Nagar*, Naimah Petigny*, Nithya Rajan, Lisa Santosa*, Maria Schwedhelm, Alaina Szostkowski The scenes, ‘Wall of Names’ and ‘Ramallah Goddam’ seeded in an in-class workshop with: Esther Ouray Artistic Direction: Tarun Kumar Course Conceptualization, Organization, & Facilitation: Richa Nagar *Rebecca Lieser,…

Esmae is a graduate from the University of Minnesota who earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies while minoring in Communications. The interconnectedness of politics of power, knowledge-making, and the pedagogical potential of stories serves the basis for her research. Drawing on her experience in Richa Nagar’s graduate course Stories, Bodies, Movements, she explores…

Raised by a single mother who is a generous human being, indefatigable worker, and art lover nurtured by oral performances, Surafel was educated and supported by his ‘yaltemarech’ (‘uneducated’) parent. It was after he had committed himself to socially conscious artistic, journalistic, and intellectual services at notable independent and public theatres and media houses that he…

Marappachi is registered as a not-for-profit cultural organization. Founded by Late Poet Inquilab as the Founding President in 2006, it attempts to practice art and theatre that is relevant and contemporary. A. Mangai has been with the group right from its inception. The group addresses deeply ingrained prejudices in our society like caste, class and…

A. Mangai is the pseudonym of Dr. V. Padma. She retired as Associate Professor in English from Stella Maris College, Chennai. She has been actively engaged in Tamil theatre as an actor, Director and Playwright for almost three decades. She hopes that her academic, activist and artistic selves can find a vibrant intersection. Her fields of interest…

A. Revathi is transfeminist activist, writer and a crusader for LGBTIQA+ community in India. Her books The Truth About Me, A life in trans activism and Our Bodies Our Selves (Unarvum Uruvamum) are pioneering works on trans lives.  Her career as a writer won her a place on the Columbia University Butler Library banner.  She finds theatre a powerful art form.

Anna Selmeczi is a lecturer and the programme convener of the Masters in Southern Urbanism at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Her work is grounded in social and political theory, and focuses on the connections between orders of knowledge and urban spaces, and how various forms of popular politics contest and transform these…

Setareh Ghoreishi is a graphic designer and multidisciplinary digital media artist. After receiving her B.F.A. in Graphic Design from the University of Art in Tehran, Iran, she moved to the United States where she currently lives. In her work, she investigates cultural disparities, most specifically between the United States and Iran. She acquired her MFA…

Tamilarasi Anandavalli is currently pursuing her studies in theatre at the National School of Drama. Sports, yoga and theatre give her the space to explore her body, emotions and thoughts.  She has been acting in plays and short films for the past seven years.