Esther Choi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnic Studies at U.C. San Diego and recovering economics major, studying changing ideals of economic subjectivity in the U.S. post- WWII and in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. She has worked with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, Asian Americans for Equality, Sadie Nash Leadership Project, as Board Co-Secretary of OCA-NY and co-director of Asian Pacific Americans for Progress, New York. She lived in South Korea for a year participating in Jeju’s anti-base movement and volunteering for Korea House of International Solidarity.
Amy Cimini is Assistant Professor of Music at UC San Diego. As a violist and historical musicologist, she works on questions of power, community and technology in 20th & 21st century experimental music, sound art and auditory culture. She is happy to be finishing her first book, Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tense of Audible Life (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). She is also finishing a solo record with San Diego-based label Bedclub Records and has premiered Anthony Braxton’s operas Trillium R and Trillium J as a member of Braxton’s Tri-Centric Orchestra.
Magdalena Donea is a PhD student in the Communication and Science Studies program at the University of California San Diego. A long-time technologist and former political refugee, her scholarship focuses on the lived experience of placeless persons – stateless, displaced, incarcerated, unsheltered – and the ways surveillance technologies impact that experience. She holds an M.A. in Cultural Studies from the University of Washington Bothell and is a graduate of the Textual and Digital Studies program at the University of Washington Seattle.
Adriana Echeverria is a first year PhD student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UCSD.
Yến Lê Espiritu is Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. An award-winning author, she has published extensively on Asian American panethnicity, critical immigration and refugee studies, and U.S. colonialism and wars in Asia. Her most recent book is Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (University of California Press, 2014). She is also a Founding Member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (criticalrefugeestudies.com).
Alfredo González Reynoso is a writer and scholar. Alfredo studied Language and Hispanic-American Literature (UABC), and holds a master’s degree in Cultural Studies (El Colef). He has published books about border art, film criticism and about the aesthetic deconstruction of Mexican culture in the electronic music scene “ruidosón.” He is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (UABC), where he teaches about border culture, art criticism and contemporary philosophy. He is the co-founder of the Seminario Permanente de Teoría Contemporánea (SPTC) and the academic journal Círculo Spinoziano.
Dorothy Howard is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego. Her current research involves investigating the medicalization of burnout and its appearance in technological work and volunteering cultures, and in the health sciences.
Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). She organizes with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and Tech Worker Coalition.
Grant Leuning is a writer, artist and PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego. He is a member of the Comité Magonista: Tierra y Libertad and is currently writing a dissertation on the labor of ontology in the contemporary image in South Korea.
Simeon Man is an Associate Professor of History and the Associate Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities at UC San Diego. His teaching and research focus on race, militarism, and empire in the United States in the twentieth century. He is the author of Soldiering Through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (University of California Press, 2018).
Aidan McKay is a second-year undergraduate student double majoring in sociology and art history at UCSD. He is passionate about issues relating to organized labor and economic justice, specifically as they relate to workers on UCSD’s campus. To this end, he is involved with a variety of left wing political endeavors on campus including the UCSD Co-ops & Groundwork Books Collective, the UCSD Solidarity Coalition, and United Students Against Sweatshops Local 94.
Teresa Naval is a first year PhD student in Communication and Science Studies. Teresa’s research interests include speculation and other practices of future-making.
Jack Ran is a second year undergraduate student at UCSD, double majoring in political science and anthropology, with a minor in philosophy. He has been an active member in the UCSD labor movement and participates in the United Students Against Sweatshops as well as the UCSD Solidarity Coalition. He is also an active member within the UCSD Cooperatives, acting as a member within Groundwork Books Collective. Jack has helped organize a variety of student-worker demonstrations, including bringing undergraduates to picket lines on campus and coalition building among a variety of social justice organizations.
Pepe Rojo is mainly a rugby field on the WWW but practices interference in the California border zone. He has published five books and more than 200 texts in hybrid formats and genres, in spanglish, from sf interventions at the border crossing, speculative theory and fiction to a philosophical dictionary of Tijuana. He is currently raising “Tierra y Libertad” flags while trying to survive a PhD at UCSD.
Verónica Uribe del Aguila is a PhD student in Communication and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. She holds an MA in Design Studies from Parsons the School of Design and a BA in Philosophy by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Her current research analyzes the political economy of DIY making and digital manufacturing, the distributed networks in which they circulate as empowering forms of participatory technoscience in Latin America, and the tension between these new imaginaries and past legacies of extraction in the region. Uribe’s work explores the intersection between critical geography, design, labor, and feminist/ decolonial STS.
Saiba Varma is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCSD. Her research focuses on the intersections of militarism, medicine and humanitarianism in Indian-controlled Kashmir, the most densely militarized place in the world. Her book The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir is forthcoming from Duke University Press. At UCSD, she teaches courses on global health; humanitarianism; conflict and inequality; and decolonial and feminist methodologies.
Cedric Whitney earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering, before working in process automation for Bloomberg and as a senior partnership manager for a leading health AI start-up, Owkin. He is a Visiting Scholar at UCSD’s Institute for Practical Ethics, and his research interests are focused on digital inequalities and the role of privacy and transparency.
Rihan Yeh, Department of Anthropology is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCSD. She studies the effects of the Mexico-US border on public life in Tijuana; her first book is titled Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City (2018).