Akhil Kang is a Ph.D. student in Socio-cultural Anthropology at Cornell University. His Ph.D. project is building an anthropology of the elite. He is academically and politically interested in shifting the anthropological gaze away from lower caste individuals and understand victimhood and woundedness of upper caste individuals/savarnas because of affirmative action. He is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of several fields including feminist and queer studies; body politics; affect and media studies, and postcoloniality. Prior to enrolling at Cornell, Akhil received his B.A. LLB (Hons.) from NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, and is a registered Advocate with Bar Council of Delhi. Born and raised in Jalandhar (Punjab, India), he has been involved in queer and anti-caste activism and human rights lawyering. He has worked on several projects including, the role of men and masculinity in child marriages in India, feminist law archiving, and understanding gender and the sexual in institutional student movements & political formations in India.

Dhrubo Jyoti is a journalist and writer based in New Delhi. They work with the Hindustan Times and write on national affairs at the intersection of caste and sexuality, especially focusing on histories of caste apartheid, elections, and citizenship.

They are closely linked to the movement around caste and sexuality in South Asia that aims to de-center upper-caste voices from LGBTQIA+ movements. They hold a master's degree in astrophysics and a diploma in journalism and are interested in exploring the links between caste and queer desire through the works of BR Ambedkar. They live and love in Delhi.

Thao Ho is a writer and community organizer. She initiated DAMN* (*Deutsche Asiat*innen, Make Noise!) in 2017, a political platform and activist collective that aims to connect and mobilize the Asian diaspora in Germany. She is part of the research project Rev(isual)ising Intersectionality (HU Berlin and DeZim). Her research interests include club culture, queer futurity, sonic politics.

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kate-hers RHEE (이미래/李未來) is an interdisciplinary artist, arts educator, and cultural worker. Orphaned in Seoul, South Korea and transnationally adopted to a white working class Detroit suburb, she was painfully aware of racial difference in a city where the imprint of the 1960s race riots and white flight was palpable in every corner; her experience of negotiating a position in-between, specifically black and white identities, inform her artistic practice. The trauma of being a perpetual outsider galvanized the artist to focus on metamorphosis, while questioning how individual and collective suffering shapes an ethnic and national ethos. RHEE employs performance, installation, drawing, and participatory events to explore the concepts of home, kinship, cultural acquisition/appropriation, and gendered violence. She has recently given talks at the Asia Art Archive in America, in the Consortium for Race, Sexuality, and Migration at Dartmouth College, and at the Vermont College of Fine Arts as an artist-in-residence. Her projects have been shown in diverse galleries and institutions in Berlin and beyond; in Galerie Wedding, Galerie Irrgang, Galerie damdam in the Korean Cultural Center, in the Asian Art Museum and in the Berlinische Galerie; in Incheon Art Platform and in the British Museum in London. She is currently working between Newark and New York, at Rutgers University and researching at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Berlin, Germany at the Atelierhaus Mengerzeile; and South Korea, where she has been conducting independent research since 2014.

Youngsook is a London-based artist and researcher with a PhD in human geography. Youngsook's practice relates to her subjective position as a woman, mother, and migrant of Korean Heritage, coming from a working-class background. Her works often develop narratives of ‘non-fiction fantasy’, a mixture of research evidence, folk tales, mythologies and performative instructions for audience participation. Youngsook's works were shown in various institutions such as Barbican Centre, Rich Mix, Milton Keynes Art Centre, and MK Islamic Arts Heritage and Culture. Currently, she is taking up residency with Asia Art Activism at Raven Row, exploring the concept of 'political spirituality' and intimate aesthetics of community actions.

youngsookchoi.com

Cường Phạm is a London-based researcher and community organiser. He is also actively involved in the local East & Southeast Asian communities in London, working with various local refugee and precarious communities in London. Cường is also the co-founder of Indigo Magazine, a platform for new voices in/from Southeast Asia and beyond. He also hosts a monthly show NTS, an independent online radio platform. In which he attempts to musically reframe ‘Asia’ as a contested paradigm.