Alison Crosby is an associate professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University and the former director of the Centre for Feminist Research (2014–2019). Her research uses a transnational feminist lens and participatory methodologies to accompany protagonists’ multifaceted struggles to redress and memorialize colonial racialized gendered violence in Guatemala, where she has worked for almost thirty years. She is the co-editor (with Heather Evans) of Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Reflections (Rutgers University Press, 2025). She is the co-author (with M. Brinton Lykes) of Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm (Rutgers University Press, 2019), which received the 2021 Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide. The book was published in Guatemala as Más Allá de la Reparación: Protagonismo de Mujeres Mayas en las Secuelas del Daño Genocida (Cholsamaj, 2019).

Heather Evans is a doctoral candidate in the gender, feminist, and women’s studies program at York University. They are the co-editor (with Alison Crosby) of Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Reflections (Rutgers University Press, 2025). Their research draws on transnational feminist theory, critical human trafficking studies, and memory studies to examine how militarized sexual harm and racialized, gendered resistance are constructed through the transnational memorialization practices of the “comfort women” movement. Their work is informed by thirteen years of experience as a campaigner, researcher, and educator with the “comfort women” movement in the South Korean and Canadian contexts, as well as nearly a decade of research on memorialization landscapes and critical interrogations of human trafficking and modern slavery discourses.

Malathi de Alwis (1963–2021) was a renowned Sri Lankan cultural anthropologist, feminist, and environmental activist. She published widely on social movements associated with “disappearances” as well as on nationalism, militarism, displacement, suffering, and memorialisation. Her publication, Archive of Memory, curated and edited with Hasini Haputhanthri and simultaneously published in English, Sinhala, and Tamil, offers a people’s object-related history of the past seventy years of independence in Sri Lanka. A section of this work toured the island as part of the It’s About Time traveling history museum. De Alwis led “memory walks” around Colombo and collaborated on a “memory map” to document sites of violence across Sri Lanka; see historicaldialogue.lk/map.

Amber Dean is a professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University. Her research focuses on public mourning, violence, and cultural memory. She is also interested in how creative forms of cultural production (fiction, art, photography, film, and performance) disrupt and reframe commonsense understandings of whose lives (and deaths) matter to wider publics. She is the author of Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance. With Chandrima Chakraborty and Angela Failler, she has also coedited Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning.

María de los Ángeles Aguilar is a Guatemalan Maya-K´iche´ historian and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago’s Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. Her work focuses on policing and criminalization in Guatemala during the country’s civil war (1960–96). In Guatemala, she has worked on collaborative research projects centered on historical memory, collecting testimony from Indigenous communities and genocide survivors.

Karine Duhamel is Anishinaabe-Métis and a member of Red Rock Indian Band in northwestern Ontario. A historian by training, she has worked as a curator, an adjunct professor, and in the field of legal research. From 2018 to the end of its mandate in 2019, Duhamel was the director of research for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, drafting the final report and managing the Forensic Document Review Project and the Legacy Archive. She is now the director of the Indigenous Strategy for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada).

Honor Ford-Smith is a poet, theater worker, and scholar and an associate professor emerita at York University. Her most recent performance work is the ten-year performance cycle “Letters to the Dead” and “Vigil for Roxie,” coauthored with Carol Lawes, Eugene Williams, and others. Her publications include Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women (with Sistren), 3 Jamaican Plays: A Postcolonial Anthology 1977–1987, and My Mother’s Last Dance. As the founding artistic director of the Sistren Theatre Collective in Jamaica, an early Black and Caribbean feminist organization, she cowrote and directed Sistren’s Bellywoman Bangarang, Bandoolu Version, Domestics, Sweet Sugar Rage, and more.

Charlotte Henay is a weaver and poet, multidisciplinary scholar, and spiritworker. She was an assistant professor in women's and gender studies at Brock University. Henay’s deathwork sits with the bones as protocols for cultural reclamation and spiritual reparations, making Afro-Indigenous futurities in diaspora. Integral to this work are Black-Indigenous land relationships, where land—and the archive—are embodied. The substantive goal of this work is healing justice and the design of alternate worlds in relational frameworks. Henay’s work renders explicit in poetic form this process of talking with the dead and, through that, of confronting and ultimately transforming absences and silences in the archive. Her writing has been published in literary magazines and academic journals, and her multidisciplinary work has been exhibited at the Nasher Museum of Art, the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, and at conferences and galleries in Toronto, Canada.

Erica S. Lawson is an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Western University, Canada. She teaches in the areas of feminist and critical race theories and gender and post-conflict recovery. Her research focuses on the politics of Black women’s maternal activism for social change. Her most recent project is an initiative with women in Liberia who are working for peace and gender justice at Peace Hut sites, a study that documents how Liberian women utilize community councils in Peace Huts to advance gender equality and address domestic disputes through conflict resolution and mediation.

Chowra Makaremi is a writer, director, and anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. She has conducted fieldwork and coordinated several research collectives on border control in Europe. She is working on post-revolution violence in Iran and leading the ERC research program Off-Site on this subject. She published Aziz’s Notebook at the Iranian Revolution and wrote Enghelab Street: A Revolution Through Books 1979–83 with Hannah Darabi. Makaremi also directed the documentary movie Hitch: An Iranian Story.

Mila Mendez is a queer, Black Chinese doctoral candidate in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies at York University. They are interested in the capaciousness of Black feminisms and ontological Blackness when brought to bear on archives of Black and Asian entanglements. In particular, their work explores Black and Chinese intimacies in settler colonial Canada that resist and challenge historical and contemporary narratives of racial antagonisms or solidarities, and that gesture instead to processes of co-constitution and intertwined pathways to liberation.

Shahrzad Mojab, scholar, teacher, and activist, is internationally known for her work on the impact of war, displacement, and violence on women’s learning and education and Marxist feminism and antiracism pedagogy. She is a professor emerita of adult education and community development and of women and gender studies at the University of Toronto. Her most recent books include Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance; Women of Kurdistan: A Historical and Bibliographical Study (coauthored with Amir Hassanpour); Youth as/in Crisis: Young People, Public Policy, and the Politics of Learning (coedited with Sara Carpenter); Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism and Knowledge (coauthored with Sara Carpenter); Marxism and Feminism; Educating from Marx: Race, Gender and Learning (coedited with Sara Carpenter), and Women, War, Violence, and Learning.

Carmela Murdocca is the York Research Chair in Reparative and Racial Justice and a professor in the Department of Sociology at York University. She is appointed to graduate programs in sociology, sociolegal studies, and social and political thought. Her research is concerned with the intersections of racial carceral violence and the social and legal politics of repair, redress, and reparations.

Dr. Ola Osman is an Assistant Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She earned her Ph.D. in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge as a Gates-Cambridge Scholar and her Master’s degree in Women’s Studies from Oxford University, supported by a Clarendon Scholarship. Her interdisciplinary research bridges International Relations and Afro-pessimism, examining how the legacies of transatlantic slavery have shaped ethnic identities and hierarchies in sub-Saharan Africa and contributed to the proliferation of armed conflicts in the post-Cold War era.

Ayu Ratih is a PhD candidate in the history/interdisciplinary studies program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She co-coordinated an oral history project to document the stories of victims of anticommunist violence and established an archive, the Indonesian Institute of Social History. She served as the lead researcher at the National Commission for Violence against Women to investigate gender-based violence during the 1965–66 military operation. She is involved in the SSHRC-funded Transformative Memory International Network, which studies various ways of dealing with past atrocities among communities in Canada, Uganda, Colombia, and Indonesia.

Pilar Riaño-Alcalá is a professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice Institute, University of British Columbia, and co-principal investigator of the Transformative Memory International Network. Her scholarly work and research creation explore questions on the afterlives and worlds of mass violence and focus on themes of memory, traces, and social repair, and methodological engagements with difficult knowledge and knowledge exchanges. She is the author of Dwellers of Memory: Youth and Violence in Medellin, Colombia and the editor of Remembering and Narrating Conflict. She is also completing the manuscript In the Interstices of War and Peace: Memory and Social Repair in the Afterlives of Violence in Colombia.

Cordelia Rizzo is a scholar-activist, maker, and doctoral candidate in performance studies at Northwestern University, where she was awarded the Lilla A. Heston Award for Academic Excellence. Her research probes the language of touch through textile making to theorize what makes memory work possible in violent contexts. Her work straddles the intersection of performance studies, critical feminist methodologies, human rights activism, and critical phenomenology. Workshop facilitation and activism with feminist collectives and Mothers of the Disappeared in her native Monterrey inform her work.

Juanita Stephen is an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies and Black studies at the University of Windsor. Her current research is concerned with how care is taught and learned in self-organized and state-regulated care systems. Her scholarly, creative, and community practice are more broadly invested in exploring models of noncarceral care that attend to the safety, health, and wellbeing of Black children, families, and communities. Stephen holds a PhD from York University and is the cofounder of The Black Care Network.

Camille Turner is an artist/scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research. Her most recent explorations confront the entanglement of what is now Canada in the transatlantic trade in Africans. She puts into practice an Afronautic methodological frame she developed to approach colonial archives from the point of view of a liberated future. Camille is a graduate of OCAD and has recently completed a PhD at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and a Provost’s postdoctoral fellowship at University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Turner is the recipient of the 2022 Artist Prize by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Her artworks are held in museums and public and private collections.

Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj was the 2019–2021 Edward Laroque Tinker Visiting Professor at the Center for Latin American Studies, Stanford University. She is an international spokeswoman for Indigenous communities in Central America and was the first Maya-K’iche’ woman to earn a doctorate in social anthropology in Guatemala. She was instrumental in making racial discrimination illegal in Guatemala and was featured in 500 Years, a documentary about Indigenous resistance movements, for her role as an activist and expert witness in war crime trials. The author of several books, she wrote a weekly column for the El Periódico newspaper in Guatemala.