Dr. Banu Gökarıksel
Dr. Banu Gökarıksel is a Royster Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and the co-editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2014-2018). Gökarıksel received her Ph.D. in Geography from University of Washington. Gökarıksel’s academic distinctions include being awarded the 2017 Chapman Family University Teaching Award and the 2018 American Association of Geographers Enhancing Diversity Award. Her work engages cultural and political geographies, feminist geopolitics, and geographies of religion with a focus on gender, bodies, and public space. Through the ethnographic and multi-method fieldwork research she has been conducting in Turkey since 1996, she analyzes the politics of everyday life and questions of religion, secularism, and pluralism. She is interested in similar questions about religious, racial, and gender/sexual diversity, shared spaces, and social justice in the US as well.
Dr. Margherita Long
Dr. Margherita Long is an Associate Professor of East Asian Studies in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Long received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University. Long’s academic distinctions include a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Grant from Tokyo University and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Dr. Long’s research interests include Japanese Literature, Environmental Humanities, Feminist Theory and Eco-Documentary. Long’s current project is “Care, Affect, Crackup: Literature and Activism after Fukushima” which involves researching how people are using art as a form of carework that alternately intensifies and tames the scary reality of radiation.
Professor Christopher Neubert
Professor Christopher Neubert is a cultural and political geographer, PhD candidate in the Geography department at UNC-Chapel Hill, and an inaugural fellow in the Food Policy Leadership Program at George Washington University. Neubert’s Master’s Degree thesis, completed in 2017, explored the materiality of agricultural waste in a rural Iowa watershed and the power relations that emerge through the complex interactions among waste, humans, non-humans, discourse, and space. Currently, Neubert is beginning his doctoral research, which will look at how gender, sexuality, race, and nationalism have shaped the intimate geopolitics of modern agriculture in the rural United States. Neubert has previously conducted research in the tea plantations of central Sri Lanka, where he was a Fulbright scholar in 2013. Prior to joining the department, Neubert was a policy analyst for National People’s Action in Washington, DC, and for four years was a community organizer at Iowa CCI, focusing on predatory lending and foreclosure issues.
Dr. Mimi Thi Nguyen
Dr. Mimi Thi Nguyen is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Professor Nguyen received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley. Nguyen’s academic distinctions include being named a Conrad Humanities Scholar in 2013 and a John and Grace A. Nicholson Scholar in 2017. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war. Her following project is called The Promise of Beauty. She has also published in Signs, Camera Obscura, Women & Performance, positions, Artforum, The Funambulist, and Radical History Review. Nguyen has made zines since 1991, including Slander (formerly known by other titles) and the compilation zine Race Riot. She toured with other zine makers of color in 2012 and 2013, and continues to organize events and shows with and for POC punks.
Dr. Marcia Ochoa
Dr. Marcia Ochoa is an Associate Professor in the Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Professor Ochoa received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University. Dr. Ochoa is an anthropologist specialized in the ethnography of media. Her first book is on the accomplishment of femininity among beauty pageant contestants (misses) and transgender women (transformistas) in Venezuela. Ochoa’s work focuses on the role of the imaginary in the survivial of queer and transgender people in Latin America, and the place of these subjects in the nation. Through her work, Ochoa has been credited with coining the term “translatina.” Professor Ochoa is a co-founder of El/La Para TransLatinas in the Mission District of San Francisco, California to develop programming and social justice work that promote transgender Latin participation and reflects the style and grace of translatina survival. Dr. Ochoa is also the co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Dr. Sara Smith
Dr. Sara Smith is a feminist political geographer and Associate Professor of Geography at UNC, Chapel Hill interested in the relationship between territory, bodies, and the everyday. Professor Smith received her PhD in Geography from the University of Arizona, Tucson with minors in Anthropology and History. Smith teaches courses on political geography, South Asia, and critical approaches to qualitative methods. At the graduate level, Smith has taught seminars on feminist political geography and decolonizing methodologies. In her research, Smith seeks to understand how politics and geopolitics are constituted or disrupted through intimate acts of love, friendship, and birth. Smith has worked on these questions in the Ladakh region of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State in relation to marriage and family planning. Smith’s first book, Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold, will be published by Rutgers University in March, 2020. Smith is currently engaged in a new project on marginalized Himalayan youth, with Dr. Mabel Gergan. The latest publication from this collaborative work was recently released and titled, “Politics, pleasure, and difference in the intimate city: Himalayan students remake the future.” Smith is excited to also be working on making a zine with Rinchen Dolma and a group of students at the Ladakh Arts and Media Organization.
Dr. France Winddance Twine
France Winddance Twine is a Professor of Sociology at University of California Berkeley. Twine is an ethnographer, a feminist race theorist and a documentary filmmaker., whose research focuses on multiple dimensions of inequality. Her research interests include girlhood, racism and anti-racism, sociology of the body, assisted reproductive technologies, and occupational discrimination. Her empirical research is theoretically grounded in European social theory, North American critical race theory, and feminist race studies. Twine’s research provide case studies that provide a nuanced analysis of the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender inequality on both sides of the Atlantic. Twine has conducted extensive field research on both sides of the Atlantic including: Brazil, Britain, and the United States. The concept of racial literacy is one of Twine’s major theoretical contributions. In her earlier research on British interracial families, Twine examined how white English and Irish women developed racial literacy as they negotiated and conceptualized racism (and anti-racism) as members of interracial families and as the parents of children fathered by Black men. This reseaerch was published in a A White Side of Black Britain: interrracial intimacy and racial literacy (2010). She is the author and editor of 10 books and has more than 72 publicaitions including single authored books, journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, essays and reviews. Her recent publications include Geographies of Privilege (2013, with B. Gardener) Twine’s recent publications include “Technology’s Invisible Women: Black Geek Girls in Silicon Valley and the Failure of Diversity Initiatives”, in International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, vol. 1, no. 1: (2018a): 58-79 andTwine is currently writing a a series of articles and a book on race, gender and power in Silicon Valley.
