Jigna Desai is Professor in the Department of Feminist Studies and the Department of Asian American Studies at University of California — Santa Barbara. For the last 25 years, she has been dedicated to building the field of Feminist Studies through research, teaching, collaboration, engagement, cultivating spaces of sustenance and hope. They are the author and co-editor of numerous books and essays and continue to write extensively on issues of disability, race, gender, media, and sexuality as well as the potential of the university as a site for social justice. Desai sees as feminist centers as tools for speculating just futures.

Nioshi Shah is a third year PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara. They are interested in studying inequality by building a transnational understanding of privilege in South Asian spaces through an intersectional lens of caste, race, religion, class, and gender.

Katie Von Wald (She/her) is a PhD candidate in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work looks at the construction of femininity and femme sexualities through madness, medicine, and performance. Her dissertation “Chasing Auras: The Afterlives of 19th Century Hysterical Pathologies on Feminine Subjects and Unruly Queer Futures” offers a queered history of hysteria and relates to the movements of queer and feminized subjects across boundaries of reality, resistance, and confinement today. She spent ten years as a professional dancer in Boston, Ma.