Victoria Bernal is Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine "whose scholarship in political anthropology contributes to media and IT studies, gender studies, and African studies. Her work addresses questions relating to politics, gender, migration and diaspora, war, globalization, transnationalism, civil society and activism, development, digital media, and Islam. Dr. Bernal’s research is particularly concerned with relations of power and inequality and the dynamic struggles of ordinary people as they confront the cruel and absurd contradictions arising from the concentration of wealth and political power locally and globally. She has carried out ethnographic research in Sudan, Tanzania, Eritrea, Silicon Valley and cyberspace. Her articles and chapters have appeared in various collections as well as in anthropological, African Studies, and interdisciplinary journals, including American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Global Networks, Comparative Studies in Society and History, African Studies Review, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Selected publications are available below. Bernal teaches courses on Digital Media and Culture, Global Africa, Nations, States and Gender, and the Politics of Protest among others."
Angana P. Chatterji is Founding Chair, Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights at the Center for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley. A cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar of South Asia, Dr. Chatterji’s work since 1989 has been rooted in local knowledge, witness topost/colonial, decolonial conditions of grief, dispossession, agency, and affectivesolidarity. Her foundational investigations with colleagues in Indian-administered Kashmir includes inquiry into unknown, unmarked and mass graves. Chatterji’s recent scholarship focuses on political conflict and coloniality inKashmir; prejudicial citizenship in India; and violence (as a category of analysis) as agentized by Hindu nationalism, addressing religion in the public sphere; state power; gender and caste; racialization; and cultural survival, justice, and accountability. Her research alsoengages questions of “homeland,” belonging, and legacies of conflict across SouthAsia. Chatterji has served on human rights commissions and offered expert testimony at the United Nations, European Parliament, United Kingdom Parliament, and United States Congress, and has been variously acknowledged and awarded for her work. Her sole and co-authored publications include: Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law, and Nationalism in Majoritarian India (2021); Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (2019); Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal(2016); Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present (2012); Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011); Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa(2009); and reports: Access to Justice for Women: India’s Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict and Social Upheaval (2015); and BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Kashmir (2009).
Daniel Irwin is a research scientist at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the Global Program Manager for SERVIR—a flagship NASA and US Agency for International Development (USAID) program with activities in over 50 countries throughout Eastern and Southern Africa, West Africa, the Hindu Kush Himalaya, lower Mekong, and Amazonia regions. He has over 25 years of experience in satellite remote sensing applications and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the developing world. Daniel also served as a lead remote sensing specialist in support of NASA’s space archeology program, with a focus on detecting structures of the ancient Maya. He received his master’s degree in Environmental Science at Miami University in 1993.
Alan Karras is Associate Director of Interdisciplinary Social Science Programs. In his more than twenty years at Berkeley, he has taught courses on world history, classical political economy, Caribbean history, and the history of transnational crime—among others. His research interests are in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and global interactions more broadly, especially as they relate to transnational transgressions like smuggling, fraud, and corruption. He is the author of Smuggling: Corruption and Contraband in World History (2010), Sojourners in the Sun: Scots Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740-1800 (1993), and the coeditor, with John R. McNeill, of Atlantic American Societies: From Columbus through Abolition, 1492-1888 (1992). He also has co-edited a book, Encounters Old and New in World History (2017), with Laura Mitchell, that makes a case for historians to engage more with the public. He served as one of the editors for the Cambridge Dictionary of World History and was on the board of editors for Cambridge University Press's multi-volume Cambridge World History. Since 2015, he has been the lead author for the AP Edition and the Lead Media Author for other editions of the widely used textbook, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (W.W. Norton).
Jake Laperruque is Deputy Director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center For Democracy & Technology (CDT). His work focuses on national security surveillance, facial recognition, location privacy, and other key issues at the intersection of new technologies with privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.
Xiao Qiang is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of China Digital Times, a bi-lingual China news website, and an adjunct professor at the School of Information, University of California at Berkeley. He is also the director of the Counter-Power Lab, an interdisciplinary faculty-student research group focusing on the intersection of social media, digital activism and Internet freedom, based in the School of Information,UC Berkeley. Xiao is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2001, and is profiled in the book Soul Purpose: 40 People Who Are Changing the World for the Better, (Melcher Media, 2003).
Melissa Samarin is a researcher and scholar of political science and international relations with regional expertise in Russia and Eurasia. Currently, she is a research fellow at the World Institute for Development Economics Research. She holds a PhD from the University of California Berkeley and a Masters from the University of Oxford.