Moderators
Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson is Professor of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach. She has published her research in various journals including Critical Studies on Terrorism, Gender and Society, Critical Sociology, Race and Class, and Women, Gender, and Families of Color on the topics of gendered Islamophobia and state violence, FBI racialized surveillance and gendered counterterrorism, and the profiteering of private capital in the War on Terror. She is an Affiliate Faculty at the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers Law School. She has served as an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London’s Centre for the Study of Education in Muslim Contexts. She has received funding for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, American Association for the University Women, Association for the Sociology of Religion, American Sociological Association, Society for the Study of Social Problems, and Sociologists for Women in Society.
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.
May Lin is an Assistant Professor of Asian & Asian American Studies at CSULB. She is a community-rooted researcher & educator who supports transformative, intersectional, and cross-racial change led by communities of color, including as a Research Fellow for youth & movement building organizing groups- such as Californians for Justice and Youth Organize! California. She has been involved in Long Beach’s racial justice organizing ecosystem since 2014 and is currently a board member of Khmer Girls in Action, Long Beach Forward. She has organized around queer of color internationalist solidarity, People’s Budgets, youth development, grassroots media, graduate student unionizing, and grassroots organizing resisting gentrification. She has published peer-reviewed and community-engaged work on topics such as healing justice, co-governance, mental health, and Long Beach queer and trans youth of color organizing. She is working on a community-engaged, collaborative multimedia project and manuscript to uplift Long Beach's healing justice and abolitionist movements.
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.
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.
