Author Bio

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;…

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…

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…

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…

Monika Herceg (born 1990, in Sisak) is a poet, playwright, editor, feminist and popular science activist from Croatia. She is a prominent young poet of a new generation in Croatia and the most awarded young author in recent Croatian history. She grew up near Petrinja, is studying physics at the University of Rijeka and raises…

Ana Vilenica is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for the European Research Council project ‘Inhabiting Radical Housing’ at the Polytechnic and University of Turin’s Inter-university Department of Regional & Urban Studies and Planning (DIST) and a member of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab. She is the Radical Housing Journal Editor and the Editor for Central and East…

selma banich (1979, Yugoslavia) is an artist and activist. Her socially engaged art practice is grounded in explorative, processual, and activist work, and is politically inspired by anarchism and feminism. selma has worked independently and in collaboration with other artists, curators, groups, and initiatives in the Balkans, Europe, and the US. She has participated in…

Marijana Hameršak is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb and a titular Assistant Professor at the University of Zagreb. Her areas of research are migration, children’s literature and book history. She is the author of the book Pričalice: o povijesti djetinjstva i bajke (Taletellers: the History of Childhood and…

Sean Cameron Golden is a doctoral student in Literacy Education at the University of Minnesota. There he explores how storytelling (in all its forms) can help to restore narratives to breathe life into the Black Queer Diaspora–for all the queer kids out there still searching. As a part of his work in the Department of…

Richa Singh is a saathi of Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan, a movement of farmers and laborers in Sitapur District of Uttar Pradesh, India. Immersed in organizational and movement building work for over two and half decades, she has co-authored a number of books, articles, and essays, including Sangtin Yatra: Saat Zindgiyon Mein Lipta Nari Vimarsh,…

Kurdish-Iranian born, sculptor, architect and interdisciplinary artist, working in installation, site specific, performance art, social practice, and sculpture. Pedram is based in between Minneapolis, Minnesota and Denton/Dallas, Texas. He has been featured in numerous national and international solo and group art exhibitions since 2010 such as the Victoria and Albert museum, London 2012, Documenta 13th…

Nick Kleese is an Iowa farm kid turned literacy educator. Nick is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Editor at Climate Lit, Co-Founder of KidLitLab!, and an inaugural member of the Whippoorwill YA Award: an award recognizing rural representation in young adult literature. He has taught…

Deondre Smiles (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) is an Indigenous geographer whose ongoing research agenda is centered in the argument that tribal protection of remains, burial grounds, and more-than-human environments represents an effective form of ‘quotidian’ resistance against the settler-colonial state. This is in continuation of his dissertation work, which centered around Indigenous/settler contestations over…

Suzanne Chew is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary, researching environmental decision-making and inclusive participation, and learning from Inuit communities in western Nunavut. Chew is an international student from Singapore, with a diasporic life–she grew up in the United Kingdom and has lived and worked in three continents.…

Efadul Huq is a poet, urban planner, community-based archivist, and mutual aid organizer currently based in Northampton, MA. He works as faculty in the Environmental Science & Policy program at Smith College. Inspired by multiple energies in and beyond the academy, Huq’s works span environmental justice issues, international community development, urban sustainability, and political ecology,…

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

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…

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…

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).

Roksana Bahramitash earned her Ph.D. at McGill sociology department and pursued a career in academia teaching at McGill and Concordia universities and publishing many academic books and articles on gender and development. Alongside academia and policy advising Bahramitash has produced a documentary on Afghanistan. Her work is now focused on storytelling and creative nonfiction. She…

Dr Minoo Moallem is a Gender & Women’s Studies professor and the Director of Media Studies at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of  Persian Carpets: The Nation as a Transnational Commodity (Routledge, 2018). Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran, (University of California Press, 2005 ), and…

Dr Fatemeh Sadeghi is a political scientist specialized in political thought and gender studies. She previously researched on gender ethics in Islamic sharia and Zoroastrianism, gender in nationalism and Islamism, Islamist politics, and Iranian Revolution. She also studied the unveiling campaign of the first Pahlavi Iran and the compulsory hijab of the Islamic Republic. In recent years she worked on the constitutional thought in…

Dr. Yalda Hamidi is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Minnesota State University. She is interested in transnational and Islamic feminisms, feminist pedagogy, and feminist cultural and literary studies. Her article, “Politics of Location in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis” is under publication in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. In 2020, she published “Locating Sickness:…

A Adams (they/them) is a PhD student in Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. They specialize in disability, rhetoric, and narrative. Outside of the university, A spends their time writing, playing competitive trading card games, and playing basketball.

Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown is the Inaugural Chairperson of the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Her research and creative praxis explores how Black girls conceptualize freedom, creativity, and relationships in Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT). Brown founded SOLHOT in 2006 as a collective space to celebrate Black girlhood and…

Drishadwati Bargi is a doctoral candidate in the department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota. She is soon to finish a dissertation on Dalit literature and anti caste cinema. Her interests include South Asian political writings and cinema, feminist theory and post structuralist theories of power and spectacle. She can be reached…

Tahmina Sobat is a women’s human rights lawyer from Afghanistan. She obtained a law degree from the Herat University of Afghanistan in 2015. Through the FPJRA scholarship, she earned her LLM degree in International Human Rights Law from the University of Notre Dame in 2020. She received a master’s degree in Gender and Women Studies…

Vaishnavi is a performer and a MA/PhD student at the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is interested in exploring how performance is an important way of knowing, a pedagogy, and a medium through which we could explore questions of ethically co-existing with one another, in a world fraught…

Marwan Makhoul is a Palestinian poet, born in 1979 in the village of al-Boquai’a, Upper Galilee, to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. He works in engineering as a managing director of a construction company. He has several published works in poetry, prose and drama, including the poetry collections: Hunter of Daffodils, Land of the Sad Passiflora, Verses the Poems Forgot…

Soibam Haripriya is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology-Delhi. She was a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Fellow at the South Asia Institute, University of Texas, Austin and a FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University, Belgium. Recent works include her…