Mabel Denzin Gergan
Mabel Denzin Gergan is Assistant Professor in Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her research is based in the Indian Himalayan region and examines its relationship with ‘mainland’ India. She is a scholar of environmental justice, indigeneity, and race with special interests in political ecology, environmental humanities, and decolonial theorizing.
Pallavi Gupta
Pallavi Gupta is a feminist political geographer. In her interdisciplinary research, she examines the intersections of caste, labor, gender, space, and waste within urban public infrastructure. In doing so, she applies racial capitalism and racialization in relation to caste and draws on labor geographies, Dalit studies, Black feminism, and infrastructural studies.
Pallavi is a founding member of two writing collectives, Desirable Futures and Against Colonial Grounds, and a member of the South Asian Urban Climates. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and has published in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Antipode, Political Geography, & Economic and Political Weekly.
She is currently working as an Instructor in the Department of Geography, University of Hawai’i, Manoa. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked over a decade with leading feminist non-profits in India on issues of non-discrimination, law, and social justice.
Lara Lookabaugh
Lara Lookabaugh is an interdisciplinary feminist geographer whose research engages decolonial and Indigenous geographies, feminist political geography, critical development studies, and geographies of memory in Latin America and the Southern United States. Through a participatory research collaboration with a Mam Maya women’s collective in Guatemala, her current project explores how the everyday political and artistic practices of Indigenous women create space to envision and enact alternative futures. A second strand of her research combines her experience as a librarian with Indigenous and feminist geographies to investigate the temporal politics of archives and libraries.
Lara is a founding member of two editorial and writing collectives, Desirable Futures and Against Colonial Grounds, that bring together scholars to explore colonial constructions of time and futurity and the intersections of Black and Indigenous Geographies. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida, and an MS in Library and Information Studies from Florida State University. She is currently a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University.
Caitilin McMillan
Caitilin McMillan is a feminist political geographer and PhD Candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on gender and peacebuilding, as well as care, human rights, and migration. Her doctoral work uses ethnographic and qualitative research methods to explore migrants’ experiences of navigating asylum processes within the tense immigration atmosphere of Cyprus, an island situated in the geopolitical crossroads of the Aegean Sea. Her work brings attention to the everyday spaces where humanitarian organizations and migrants are finding ways to create belonging and to resist in a politically divided, fraught environment. This work contributes to feminist political geopolitics that highlight how large-scale systems of inequality in global development, citizenship status, race, and gender become visible in our daily lives. Caitilin’s research has been supported by a Rotary Peace Fellowship, the Canadian Federation of University Women, the American Association of University Women, Graduate Women International, and the National Science Foundation.
Caitilin is originally from Toronto, a hometown she returns to often and holds dearly. She loves making art and connects through this to both her grandmother’s family and her mother who were workers and artists immersed in textile work. As a mum and politically engaged scholar, she desires to always stay curious and open hearted.
Sara Smith
Sara Smith is a feminist political geographer interested in the relationship between territory, bodies, and the everyday. In her research, she seeks to understand how politics and geopolitics are constituted or disrupted through intimate acts of love, friendship, and birth. She has worked on these questions in the Ladakh region of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State in relation to marriage and family planning.
Her first book, Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold, was published by Rutgers University Press in March 2020. Her second book, Political Geography: A Critical Introduction was published by Wiley in April 2020.
Pavithra Vasudevan
Pavithra Vasudevan (she/they) is a mamma, a scholar, a lifelong practitioner of movement forms including dance, aikido and yoga, and a student of music and poetry.
Pavithra works at the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She received the 2022-23 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for her first book project, A Toxic Alchemy: Race and Waste in Industrial Capitalism, a geopoetic catalyst testifying to the fragmentation of life under racial-colonial capitalism. Their research addresses toxicity as a manifestation of racial violence, capitalist entanglements with state and science, and the abolitional possibilities of collective struggle. An interdisciplinary scholar, they have been published in a wide range of journals, including the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, Environment and Planning D, Ethnic & Racial Studies, GeoHealth, American Journal of Epidemiology, and Performance Research.
Pavithra is interested in collective knowledge production bridging political thought and grassroots organizing, and was a founding member of the FLOCK Feminist Geography Collective and the Hurston Collective for Critical Performance Ethnography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their research is grounded in creative praxis, employing performance, film, poetry and creative writing methods to reimagine scholarship as storytelling, in service to building a better world.