Kunal Joshi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on the genealogies of Hindu ritual and ecological rhythms in North India with a focus on pilgrimage, unearthing the conceptual architecture within the ritual, and textual traditions of the priests most associated with the pilgrimage. He is also interested in cities and the networks by which they are tethered to wider regions, having previously worked on the informal economy in Indian cities. His work is featured on the American Ethnological Society website. He was a Johns Hopkins University Writing Program fellow from 2024-2025 and is the recipient of a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for 2025-2026.

Naveeda Khan is professor of anthropology and affiliate faculty in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, as well as the Programs in Islamic Studies, Environmental Science and Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Khan’s research spans riverine lives and national climate policy in Bangladesh, UN-led global climate governance processes, German romanticism, Bengali and Urdu literature and, more recently, student politics. The author and editor of many books, her monographs include Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke University Press, 2012), River Life and the Upspring of Nature (Duke University Press, 2022), and In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (Fordham University Press, 2023).

Youjoung (Yuna) Kim is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and a 2025-2026 resident fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Her dissertation investigates how bureaucratic procedures and state-sanctioned kinship, with a particular focus on Jeju 4.3 (Sasam) Special Act in South Korea, shape legal recognition of victimhood among Jeju islanders and the Jeju diaspora in Osaka. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and various programs at Johns Hopkins University. Her work is featured on the American Ethnological Society website.

Sojung Kim is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. With a focus on North Korean migrant women in Gyeongsang Province, South Korea, her dissertation investigates how their travel itineraries and kinship networks across Northeast Asia are implicated within personal and collective memory, feelings of belonging, ritual practices and state policies in South Korea. She received her BA in philosophy from Yonsei University and her MA in anthropology and sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute. Before joining Johns Hopkins, she worked with a feminist activist group in Daegu, South Korea. Her work is featured on the American Ethnological Society website.

Benita Menezes is a Johns Hopkins University Writing Postdoctoral Program fellow, having graduated in 2025 with a PhD from the university’s Department of Anthropology. She uses anthropological approaches to examine the intersection of kinship disputes, land acquisition legislation, and grassroots mobilization and to ask how new forms of political action and legal reasoning emerge in the rush for India’s urban transition. Prior to her foray into the social sciences, Benita trained in architecture (India) and urban planning (Canada). With Rohit Mujumdar she is coauthor of “Maharashtra: Institutional Politics and the Framing of Resistance” in the edited volume Power, Policy, and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her work is also featured on the American Ethnological Society website.

Sumin Myung is a lecturer in the Cultural Anthropology Programme at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa, New Zealand. His in-progress book examines the formation and evolution of scientific forestry in a postcolonial context, asking how historical violence and crises such as Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, and anthropogenic climate change have informed and are addressed by everyday scientific practices in laboratories and field sites. His writing is featured on the American Ethnological Society website. He was awarded the 2024 Roy A. Rappaport Prize from the Anthropology and Environment Society for his essay “Plotting Forests: Scientific Expertise and the Threads of Storytelling in South Korean Anthropogenic Forests.” 

Sadia Shirazi is an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in the history of South Asian art, architecture, and visual culture in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Shirazi was previously a curator of international art at the Tate Modern in London and an instructor of curatorial studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City. Shirazi is a recipient of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Their current book project is about the artists Zarina, Nasreen Mohamedi, Lala Rukh and Rummana Hussain. It is a history of decolonial abstraction, postcolonial feminism, and postwar avant garde movements of art that connect the Indian subcontinent, Indian Ocean, Western Europe, and the United States during the second half of the twentieth century.