Vandana Shiva has become an iconic figure in the fight against the corporate takeover of agriculture. Her “Raise Awareness, Inspire Change” tour of Hawaiʻi in January will bring attention to two very important issues – seed sovereignty and food sovereignty (or what she calls food freedom or food democracy)… read more

Monisha Das Gupta is the director of the Center for South Asian Studies, and associate professor of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. She is the author of Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics (Duke University press, 2006), and has written about the post-9/11 racial landscape, and its impact on South Asians.  The essay, “Of Hardship and Hostility” in Wounded City: The Social Impact of 9/11 edited by Nancy Foner (Russell Sage Foundation, 2005) documents the violence directed at South Asian and Middle Eastern yellow cab drivers in New York City.

S.P. Udayakumar is a member of the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy and the National Alliance of Anti-Nuclear Movements.  He is one of the leaders of the non-violent protests against the Koodankulam nuclear power project in Tamil Nadu.  He got his doctoral degree from the Political Science Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 1996.  He is the author of Presenting the Past: Anxious History and Ancient Future in Hindutva India (Praeger 2005) and Handcuffed to History: Narratives, Pathologies, and Violence in South Asia (Praeger 2001).  See “UH alum S.P. Udayakumar leads anti-nuclear movement in India.”

Waquar Ahmed, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Dr. Ahmed studies the socio-economic and environmental contradictions of capitalism.  His current research focuses on global governance institutions, corporate power, foreign direct investments, exploitation of nature in general and conventional energy resources in particular, energy infrastructure, and state-society relations.  He also examines the genealogy of global and national economic change, and social and environmental movements in opposition to such change.

Charu Gupta, Associate Professor of History at the University of Delhi. Dr. Gupta is the author of Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (co-published by Permanent Black, Delhi & Palgrave, New York, 2002) and Contested Coastlines: Fisherfolk, Nations and Borders in South Asia (Routledge, Delhi and London, 2008). In 2006, she was the Rama Watumull Distinguished Indian Scholar at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

 S. Shankar, Professor, Department of English, University of Hawai’i at Manoa. S. Shankar’s book of criticism Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation and the Vernacular is forthcoming from University of California Press. He is currently working on his third novel.