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…

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…

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…

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…

Elora is a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA. Her newest book is titled, Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh (2022).

Medha Muskan is a poet, farmer, youth worker, and storyteller invested in questions of justice and solidarity, especially in the realms of farm & food, Brown & Queer histories, and children’s development.

PARAKH can be translated as critical eye or mindful scrutiny. In Parakh Theatre, this scrutiny happens through a full immersion of BodySoulMind. Artists and audiences from diverse and unequal locations, languages, and journeys come together to critically engage with sociopolitical, ecological, and epistemic injustices and structures of violence that shape our lives, and in which…

Richa Nagar’s antidisciplinary and transgenre scholarship, creative writing, and cultural work in English and Hindustani has evolved across the borders of India, the U.S., and Tanzania. An anti-disciplinary border-crosser, she loves to agitate stabilized ways of knowing and telling through collective creativity and she strives to build enduring alliances with people’s struggles while engaging questions of…

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…

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…

Tamar Shirinian is a cultural anthropologist whose work explores the connections between sexuality, gender, intimacy, and political economy. Her research and many of her political and creative commitments are in the Republic of Armenia. Inspired by and engaged with queer, psychoanalytic, anti-colonial, and Marxian thought, Tamar takes up research and theory as forms of reimagining…