Haden Smiley (they/them) is a recent graduate of Berkeley’s music department, where they earned a master’s in ethnomusicology. They are interested in the political economy of social media, especially the impacts of financial transfer services on social movements and their fundraising.
Fernanda Cunha (she/her) is a fourth year PhD student in the Ethnic Studies department whose research focuses on queer diasporic literary aesthetics. She has a cat named Sunny.
A proud Chicana from the South Texas Rio Grande Valley, Limairy (she/ella) is the daughter of Veronica and Hector, and the second of four siblings. As a second-year MPH student, Limairy is deeply passionate and committed to uplifting the health and wellbeing of under-served and under-resourced communities while building power for health justice. Some of her research interests include: fighting racist health inequities, engaging in trauma-informed care and sexual violence prevention, and advocating for public health change via policy-related efforts. In her free time she enjoys the art and science of cooking, heart-to-heart conversations, and exploring new books and documentaries.
Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender, the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, and serves as a core member of the Haas Institute’s Disability Studies and LGBTQ Citizenship Clusters. Mel’s research and teaching interests include queer and gender theory, animal studies, critical race theory, Asian American studies, disability studies, science studies, and critical linguistics. Mel’s book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke UP 2012, Alan Bray Memorial Award), explores questions of racialization, queering, disability, and affective economies in animate and inanimate “life.” Further writing can be found in Women’s Studies Quarterly, GLQ, Discourse, Women in Performance, Australian Feminist Studies, Amerasia, and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. With series coeditor Jasbir K. Puar, Mel recently inaugurated a new book series called “Anima” highlighting scholarship in critical race and disability post/in/humanisms at Duke University Press. A special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies on “Queer Inhumanisms,” coedited with Dana Luciano, appears in 2015.
