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.

Jocelyn Stitt spent the past year as a Visiting Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan after completing a three-year term as Division Chair of the Social Sciences and Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Critical Studies of Race and Ethnicity at St. Catherine University. Previously she was Director of Faculty Research Development at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. There she catalyzed research collaborations related to social justice, provided strategic planning for research initiatives and faculty led research groups, and chaired award committees for fellowships and grants. Stitt holds a joint PhD in Women’s Studies and English. Her interests include Caribbean and postcolonial culture studies, genre studies, life writing, feminist epistemology and science studies, and archival studies. Stitt’s book Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing (2021) is part of Rutgers University’s Critical Caribbean Studies series. The project examines how the unfulfilled promise of postcolonial historical recovery, especially in the form of archival absences related to women’s lives, itself becomes a generative site for feminist epistemologies in contemporary Caribbean women’s research and life writing. She is currently working on a project related to Caribbean feminist digital praxis as it relates to searching for family histories and genealogies. Stitt’s work has appeared in journals such as Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Ariel: A Review of International Literature, and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. She edited Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse and Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage within Britain.

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.