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…

Refaat Alareer is a renowned Palestinian writer, poet, literary scholar, and activist, often referred to as ‘the voice of Gaza’. Alareer was one of the founders of “We Are Not Numbers” project, a Palestinian non-profit set up in 2015 that joined writers from around the world with young people in Gaza to “tell the stories…

Wendy Lutter is a first year PhD student in the Leadership in International and Intercultural Education cohort of OLPD at UMN. Her area of research lies in the gender inequities in higher education business schools. Wendy is on the marketing faculty at Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches and…

Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny is a Black feminist scholar, dancer, and abolitionist educator. She is an Assistant Professor of Literary Arts and Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and holds the Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design. Pétigny’s research and teaching are shaped by her experiences as a youth organizer,…

University of Cape Town and University of Basel Professor of Urban StudiesAfrican Centre for Cities, University of Cape TownUrban Studies, University of Basel Sophie Oldfield co-designed and now teaches in two new innovative urban studies post-graduate programs. Her research explores informality and the politics of urban governance, paying close attention to political practice and everyday…

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…

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…

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…

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:…

Joy Mazahreh is an English PhD student minoring in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. She studies feminist postcolonialism with special attention to the works of Edward Said. Originally from Amman, Jordan, she received her BA in English from the University of Jordan and then was awarded a Fulbright grant to…

Fatemeh Nasr Esfahani is a Ph.D. student in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota. She also holds a doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Isfahan, Iran (2018). Fatemeh’s research interests include diverse aspects of humor in Iranian society, specifically the role of humor in people’s everyday lives. Her Ph.D. reseaarch project at…

PhD candidate, Department of Geography, Environment and SocietyUniversity of Minnesota Julie is a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Minnesota. Her work focuses on struggles over resource extraction, particularly gold and uranium mining, in the Black Hills of western South Dakota. In this, she critiques the various ways that non-Indigenous worldviews attempt to…

Jacinta Kerketta is a poet, writer, and freelance journalist, belonging to an Oraon Adivasi community of West Singhbhum district. She writes in Hindi. In her poems, Jacinta highlights the injustices committed on the Adivasi communities, along with their struggles. Her poems are also important cultural and artistic documents of Adivasi worldviews. Jacinta is the author…

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…

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…

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…

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.

Beau Beausoleil is a poet and activist based in San Francisco, California. His two most recent chapbooks are: The Killing of George Floyd (Intermittent Press, 2023) and Poems for Ukraine (Barley Books, UK, 2023). These poems also appear in the online Moving Parts Press Digital Poetry Series as Poems for George Floyd and In Ukraine: Poems. He is the founder of…

Madelaine C. Cahuas is a Latina feminist geographer from Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada) studying urban politics, place-making, care work and activism with racialized migrant and Latinx communities. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota and is affiliated with Chicano & Latino Studies, American Studies, and Gender,…

Ph.D. candidate, Department of GeographyUniversity of Minnesota 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…

Vishal Jamkar is a Ph.D. student in Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. He is engaged in praxis-based research on the issues of caste, indigeneity, natural resources, and the politics of development. Prior to joining graduate school, he worked as a community mobilizer with Dalit and Adivasi community collectives in central India around issues of…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

Fawad Khan is a playwright, actor, and director from Pakistan. He graduated from the National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA), Karachi, majoring in direction for stage, in 2008. Since then he has been consistently doing theatre—directing, acting, assisting, writing/translating/adapting. He has acted in major productions such as KING LEAR (Dir. Zia Mohyeddin), READER by Ariel…

Rahsaan Mahadeo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Black Studies program at Providence College. As a scholar of race, time, the human and the episteme, Rahsaan studies how time is racialized, how race is temporalized and how racialization and racism condition youth’s perspectives on time. In his forthcoming book, Funk the Clock: Transgressing Time while Young,…

Actor, Director, Screen-writer TARUN KUMAR is an actor, director, and screen-writer who loves to create plays and films. He has been working in the performing arts in India for over three decades. Since 2007, Tarun has collaborated with Richa Nagar and the Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (Sangtin Farmers and Laborers Organization) in Uttar Pradesh to create plays…

Ola is an architect, practicing architecture in both fields of design and research. Ola is currently working as cultural representative in Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities. Ola was born in Baghdad and left Iraq because of the war when she was 10 years old. She moved to Bahrain with her family, where she continued…

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…