Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis

About the Editors and Contributors

219 About the Editors and Contributors Editors Amanda Lock Swarr is Assistant Professor of Women Studies at the University of Washington. She holds a PhD in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota and was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Barnard College of Columbia University from 2003–2005. Amanda has been working with South African activists since 997 on questions of (trans)gender rights, LGBT justice, and HIV/AIDS treatment access. She has also been collaborating and writing with Sam Bullington since 995 and Richa Nagar since 996. She has published articles in Signs, The Journal of Homosexuality, and Feminist Studies, and her current book project is entitled Sex in Transition: Apartheid and the Remaking of Gender and Race. Amanda’s activist passions center on medical equity and justice and sexual violence/self-defense. Richa Nagar is Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota (USA) and a founding member of Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan in Sitapur District of Uttar Pradesh (India). She has coauthored Sangtin Yatra: Saat Zindagiyon mein Lipta Nari Vimarsh, Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India, and A World of Difference: Encountering and Contesting Development. Richa’s academic research on gender, race, and communal politics among South Asian communities in postcolonial Tanzania and her subsequent work have resulted in numerous articles and essays. Since 996, her research, organizing, and creative writing (in Hindustani) have focused mainly on collaborative efforts that seek to reconfigure the political terrain and processes associated with “empowerment” projects aimed at “the poor.” Richa was a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 2005–2006. 220 About the Editors and Contributors Contributors M. Jacqui Alexander’s work has focused extensively on the relations between nationalism and sexuality and on the ways in which heterosexualization works as a verb to organize nation-building projects across both neoimperial and neocolonial formations. Her most recent book, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred is a critical illustration of these links that both reformulate dominant notions of modernity and shore up the utility of transnational feminist frameworks. Other recent work has wrestled with the sacred dimensions of experience and the significance of sacred subjectivity. Under the auspices of a Guggenheim fellowship she has continued work on the embeddedness of Kongo epistemology within metaphysical systems in the Caribbean. Alexander serves on the editorial boards of Feminist Review, Signs, and Dawn (Canada); she has lectured extensively in the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Africa. She is a member of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action. Alexander is Cosby Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College and Professor of Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto. Deborah Barndt has struggled for four decades to integrate her artist, activist, and academic selves. From engagement in U.S. civil rights, antiwar, and women’s movements (960s) to doctoral research on Freirean pedagogy in Peru (970s), from training literacy teachers in participatory photo-story production in revolutionary Nicaragua (early 980s) to organizing multisectoral workshops of activists in diasporic Toronto, Canada (late 980s/early 990s), her work has been informed by feminist methodologies, transnational analysis, and praxis-orientation. Since the mid-990s, she has been teaching popular education, gender and development, and community arts in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. As a photographer, she has exhibited widely, and has published ten books, including To Change This House: Popular Education under the Sandinistas and Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail, as well as edited volumes Women Working the NAFTA Food Chain: Women, Food and Globalization and Wild Fire: Art as Activism. Danielle Bouchard is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research interests include feminist theory, postcolonial studies, critical studies of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, and theories of language. She is currently About the Editors and Contributors 221 working on a book manuscript that critically examines the centrality of the concepts of interdisciplinarity and globalism to the contemporary U.S. university and their reconsolidation of the university’s mission around longer-lived racial, sexual, and national formations. Her work has appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Contretemps, and will be included in an upcoming issue of Differences. Sam Bullington is an Assistant Professor...