authors

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.

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 orders and the injustices they sustain. Anna’s current research and teaching focuses on urban theory, embodied research methods and pedagogies, and the processes and practices of knowledge production in urban studies.

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 are theatre, gender and translation studies. Her passion is to concentrate on community theatre – to make theatre the voice of the voiceless, or the marginalized.  She has directed over thirty -five plays so far. All of them deal with women –centered themes and characters. Her book Acting Up:…

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 later joined Addis Ababa University (AAU). He then formally studied literature, politics, cultural studies, and performance historiography. Surafel brings in his multi-genre methods and invites also non-academic intellectuals to the classes he teaches. Currently, he is the Inaugural Okwui Enwezor postdoctoral fellow at The Africa…

On Stage: Kriti Budhiraja, Devan Dupre, Esmae Heveron, Keavy McFadden, Sara Musaifer, Richa Nagar, Jason Noer, Beaudelaine Pierre, Veronica Quillien, Julie Santella, Maria Schwedhelm, Laura Seithers, Veera Vasandani, Colin Wingate Artistic Direction, Sound, & Lights: Tarun Kumar Course Conceptualization, Organization, & Facilitation: Richa Nagar

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 to see landscape, capitalist extraction, and containment, through this place. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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 along the densely militarized Line-of-Control (LoC) in Gurez, Bandipora, Leh, and Kargil, has shaped her research questions and practice, as well as the ways she envisions anthropological commitments to public and engaged work. She is also deeply invested in building meaningful local and global solidarities and works closely with civil society activists in…

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 of her family’s history in India and East Africa. As a 2020 Naked Stages Fellow, Alia is creating and will perform a one-person show about culture, memory, and migration. Alia’s collaborations include Artemis, Nanilo, Mixed Precipitation, and Our Space is Spoken For. When not singing, writing,…

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.

Ph.D. student, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of MinnesotaTransbalkan solidarityImagining Transnational Solidarities Research Circle Fellow (ITSRC) Emina explores barefoot the intersections of refuge-ness, racist and classist formations, education-scapes, and political resistances in solidarity. Her work revolves around the critical understanding of border regimes through interplay of the police violence and refugees’ resistance to restrictions of freedom of movement. Emina’s research focuses on the inscriptions of regimes of criminalization of refugee youth in schooling and everyday life as a result of state surveillance and transnational securitization politics. Emina is deeply annoyed by capitalistic and neoliberal organization of the economy 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. Under colonial rule, boxing and ideas of ‘sportsmanship’ were instrumentalized as tools of cultural imperialism and the creation of the ‘ideal colonial subject’. Abraham’s research articulates how African boxing ultimately became a potent form of cultural expression which contested colonial notions of ‘fair play’ and…

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 the relationship between Indigenous lands and natural resources, cultural practices, and in and out-of-school educational development in the Americas.

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 vit aujourd’hui à Saint-Paul, Minnesota avec ses deux enfants, Max en Annie.

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 South Africa. She is committed to creative approaches to history that link art, activism, and African history, and draws on critical approaches to people’s history projects, popular education, and feminist collaborative research praxis in her work with various student, activist, and cultural collectives in southern…

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 modernist and developmentalist machines enhance racism and segregation. Her main effort is to teach and spread challenging perspectives and diverging political stances from peripheral worlds and ontologies on issues like land, housing, and education.

Daanish Mustafa is a Professor in Critical Geography, at the Department of Geography, King’s College, London. His research interests have been in water resources, environmental hazards, development and critical geographies of violence and terror. He has published extensively on these topics in peer-reviewed academic journals as well as in popular publication outlets. He has in particular been interested in how social theoretical insights can contribute towards pragmatic pathways for emancipatory politics and struggles, especially in the context of access to water and vulnerability to hazards. Geographically his research has been on South Asia, but he has also undertaken funded research…

Raquel Chaves is a Tupinambá indigenous. She is a doctoral student in  Anthropology from University of Brasilia. She holds a master’s degree in Botanic.

Sarah Almeida holds a master’s degree in sociology and anthropology from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a degree in anthropology from University of Brasilia. She has done research on images and bodies and leads her academic and personal interests to think about new and other counter-narratives.

Katayoun is an Iranian-born and Minneapolis-based artist. Her art is an attempt to understand the relationship between past and present, tradition and modernity, and individual versus collective identity, as well as to spur discussion about our understanding of time and the tangled roots of our histories.

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 of two bi-lingual (Hindi and English) full-length collections of poems – Angor (Adivani, Kolkata) and Jadon Ki Zameen (Bharatiya Jnanpith, New Delhi). She sits on the editorial board of AGITATE! Unsettling Knowledges.

Visual Artist Nací en Lima, Perú, 1982. Vivo en la Ciudad de México. Trabajo principalmente a partir de experiencias de diálogo dando lugar a reflexiones conjuntas acerca de la realidad que nos atañe. Me involucro en situaciones que permitan, a través de procesos artísticos y de aprendizaje, la generación de vínculos humanos francos, aún sean éstos efímeros, para lo cual me han sido útiles los encuentros intuitivos que el cuerpo permite. Me he acercado a prácticas como la danza Butoh (de origen japonés) y en general al trabajo en talleres  que abordan cuerpo y movimiento como detonantes de conocimiento. Decanto esta…

Professor of the CollegeRussell M. and Elizabeth M. Bennett Chair in ExcellenceBeverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal ArtsUniversity of Minnesota, Twin Cities Richa writes, organizes, performs, shares, and builds in whatever languages, genres, and modes of learning are available to her. She has studied and worked in the US since 1989, but feels most alive when she is immersed in the thick honey of the everyday Urdu, Hindi, and Awadhi that she grew up with in the narrow lanes of Old Lucknow. An anti-disciplinary border-crosser, she believes in agitating stabilized ways of knowing and telling through collective creativity. Richa…

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 (HCMC). She is currently a second-year master’s student at the School of Public Health pursuing her degree in Public Health Policy and Administration and is an Interdisciplinary Center for Global Change (ICGC) Fellow Scholar. During her time as a student at the University of Minnesota,…

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 Dramas: Reimagining Rural Political Action in Eastern India(Routledge, 2009). Her recent research has moved toward the study of the ways in which South Asian communities in Canada name, challenge, and reproduce state violence.

Ph.D. CandidateComparative & International Development Education (CIDE)University of Minnesota Sara was raised along the shores of two archipelagoes, Bahrain and the Philippines, with songs and stories of moon-swallowing whales, mountains bursting into flames, and giants reigning over ancient plains. Focusing on K-12 education in Bahrain, Sara’s research crosses multiple borders to bring into question the intertwining histories and structural conditions producing a particular knowledge about the desired girl citizen-subject. Through girls’ enactments of political agency and imaginations of success, Sara also traces how they creatively engage with this knowledge and move past its rationales and scripts. In her other life,…