authors

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,…

Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS) is a people’s movement in Sitapur District of Uttar Pradesh in India. It emerged from Sangtin, a group formed by rural women to enable them to shape the processes of development at all levels. The SKMS saathis or members are mainly marginal farmers or landless laborers in rural Sitapur. More than 90 percent of the approximately 8000 voluntary saathis identify as Dalit, with women and men being equally active in the Sangathan. The overall planning is done by a 45-member core group. Working through collective action, SKMS has led many struggles in the District, e.g.,…

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 cultural representations? And why do education and educational practices take such a central role in the production of urban space and anticipatory politics in Chicago? Through her work, Keavy explores how narrow conceptions of education politics within geography might be productively expanded beyond formal schooling…

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 minimize, eliminate, and otherwise do violence to Lakota knowledges of their ancestral homelands. Julie lives in Rapid City, SD, in the shadow of the beautiful Black Hills. She considers it an honor to live and work alongside creative, brilliant defenders of Lakota sovereignty.

Ph.D. candidate, Hispanic & Lusophone Literatures and Culture University of Minnesota Sandra Rellier is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic & Lusophone Literatures and culture at the University of Minnesota. She also received a Master’s degree from the University of Minnesota. Her work focuses on recovering the memories of the French and Spanish pied-noirs and the Portuguese retornados, who were forced to leave the African colonies after independence. In her dissertation project, she shows that there is a discernible discourse of memory among European ‘returnees,’ which goes beyond national boundaries and creates a “Returnee Diaspora.”

PhD candidate, Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies University of Minnesota SeungGyeong Ji is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Ji’s dissertation work is about the abortion politics in South Korea which has historically intermingled with the U.S. population control governance during  the Cold War. Ji has been a member of Korea Sexual Violence Relief Center (KSVRC) since 2005 and volunteered for the Speak Out of the survivors of sexual violence. Ji published “A Time to Mourn, a Time to Dance: Abortion Death Rituals in South Korea” in Religion and…