Protest

Hailed as the “age of protest,” the current moment has revitalized public dissent from racialized and marginalized groups domestically and globally. This issue’s contributors use past, present, and future histories of protest to narrate these tumultuous moments of mass participation through the lens of feminist scholarship—invigorating mainstream dialogue with understudied and overlooked accounts.

Elena L. Cohen is currently a PhD student in the political science department at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and an adjunct associate professor at the City University of New York system. She received her JD from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and served as the president of the New York City Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild for two terms. Currently, she is serving as co-chair of the NYC Chapter’s Mass Defense Committee. Her areas of expertise include sexuality, non-human animals, and comparative constitutional law.

Melissa M. Forbis is an assistant professor in the sociology department at Stony Brook University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in social anthropology and an M.A. from Temple University in visual anthropology. She has published several book chapters and articles on gender and indigenous rights in Latin America. Her research interests include transnational feminist theory, race/ethnicity, indigenous rights, anthropology of the state and nationalism, immigration, and Latin America. She is currently working on her book manuscript, tentatively titled Engendering Autonomy: Indigenous Women’s Struggles and the State in Mexico, which examines the Zapatista Army of National Liberation's local autonomy project in Chiapas, Mexico.

Deepti Misri is a literary and cultural critic whose work focuses broadly on questions of gender, violence, and representation. She is currently the director of undergraduate studies and an associate professor in the women’s and gender studies department at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her areas of interest span South Asian literary and cultural production, transnational feminist studies, and feminist theory and criticism. In addition to her monograph Beyond Partition, her articles have appeared in Signs, Meridians and South Asian Popular Culture, among other venues. She is currently serving on the editorial board for the recently relaunched journal Genders Future Tense and the Himalayan Studies journal Himalaya.

Saadia Toor is an associate professor of sociology and women’s studies at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She has written extensively on issues of culture, nationalism, gender/sexuality, state formation, and international political economy. Toor was also co-editor of the 2014 special issue of Women's Studies Quarterly on the theme of solidarity. In 2011, she published The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan, an exploration on the history of Pakistan through the lens of its cultural politics, with an emphasis on the role of the Left.