Collective
Azza Basarudin is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Basarudin’s research and teaching interests are transnational feminisms, gender and social movements in the Muslim world, Islam and gender/sexuality, women of color feminisms, and human rights, emphasizing Southeast Asia. She has held visiting positions and fellowships at Harvard Divinity School, Syracuse University, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia, and the American University in Cairo. The University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation, among others, have supported her research. Her writings have appeared in journals such as Feminist Studies, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Feminist Formations, and Scholar and Feminist Online. Basarudin’s book, Humanizing the Sacred: Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Gender Justice in Malaysia, was published by the University of Washington Press (2016).
Araceli Esparza is a Professor in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach. She is working on a book project that examines the hierarchies within Latinidad as represented in cultural production by Chicana/o/x and U.S. Central American cultural producer. She teaches courses in Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x literature and cultural production, creative writing by writers of color, and race and gender theory. Most recently her work has appeared in Latino Studies, Aztlán, the Journal of Feminist Scholarship, and the collection Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo.
Stacy I. Macias is Associate Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at CSU, Long Beach. She recently served as the inaugural Visiting Research Scholar of The Latina Futures, 2050 Lab at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center. The archival project she initiated, “Latina Lesbians Organizing in Los Angeles, 1970-2020" examines the critical contributions of self-identified U.S. Latina lesbians who catalyzed social change and impacted generations of Latinas, LGBTQ communities, and the overall social conditions of Latina/o/x/s in the U.S. She is co-editor with Liliana Gonzalez of the Journal of Lesbian Studies special two-volume issue, “Chicana Lesbians: Re-Engaging the Iconic Text ‘The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About.’” Her research and teaching are in feminist of color knowledge production; feminist transnational activisms; and Chicana feminist cultural politics including queer of color femininities, joteria studies, butch-femme desire, and lesbian counter-publics.
Felicia 'Fe' Montes (M.A./M.F.A.) is a Xicana Indigenous holistic artivist, femcee, designer, poet, professor, public scholar, and practitioner of the healing arts from East Los Angeles. She is the co-founder and director of Mujeres de Maiz, In Lak Ech, Botanica del Barrio and El MERCADO y Mas and assistant professor in Chicanx/Latinx arts and social practice at Cal State University Long Beach. She has published in the books Fleshing the Spirit, Voices from the Ancestors, and MeXicana Fashions and is the coeditor of the book Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice and Feminist Praxis (University of Arizona Press, 2024)
Preeti Sharma is Assistant Professor of American Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Her scholarship on feminist theories of work, racial capitalism, service economies, women of color and Asian American feminisms, and alternative labor organizing has appeared in The Journal of Asian American Studies, The Labor Studies Journal, and Society & Space. She is also co-editor and co-author of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice, which documents the work of the Auntie Sewing Squad, a mutual aid network led by women of color that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic to sew hundreds of thousands of masks for communities made vulnerable. Her book project, The Thread Between Them, examines the transnational beauty practice of threading in South Asian beauty salons across Los Angeles, with a focus on how salon workers manage aesthetics and temporality in order to create relations and communities.
Sabella Moreno (she/they) is the Assistant to the Deans and Social Media Strategist for the College of Liberal Arts at California State University, Long Beach. She received her Master of Arts in English Literature at CSULB, emphasizing in 21st century ethnic literature, post-colonial theory, queer studies, and critical pedagogy. Moreno holds teach-ins for community members to learn important critical theories (such as intersectionality, colonialism, hegemony, and Orientalism), and how to apply them to political movements, the current moment, and the community. She believes that education should be accessible to all and that community teach-ins are a critical point of entry.
Sabella has provided instrumental logistical support to make this conference happen.
