Ronak K. Kapadia is assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and affiliated faculty in Global Asian Studies and Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author of the forthcoming publication Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press, 2019), which examines the visionary, world-making potential of contemporary art and aesthetics in the context of ongoing US war and empire in the Greater Middle East. Kapadia is co-editor of the 2017 special issue of Surveillance & Society on race and surveillance, and his writings appear in Asian American Literary Review, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Feminist Formations, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and edited volumes including: Shifting Borders: America and the Middle East/North Africa, Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, and With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and US Empire. Kapadia has begun research toward his second book project, The Downward Redistribution of Breath, which develops a critical feminist theory of healing/justice in the wilds of imperial decline.
Patrisia Macías-Rojas is an Assistant Professor in Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests are in the areas of race, law, and migration. Her current work examines historical, economic, and political links between the immigration and criminal justice systems. Combining history and ethnography her recent book, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America (New York University Press, 2016) analyzes how the politics and policies of civil rights reforms and mass incarceration gave rise to the punitive turn in immigration and border enforcement. From Deportation to Prison won the 2017 Oliver Cromwell Cox book award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities.
Jan Sowa is a materialist dialectical social theorist and researcher. He studied at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland and University Paris VIII in Saint-Denis, France. He holds a PhD in sociology and a habilitation in cultural studies. He has had research and teaching assignments at several universities in Poland and abroad, including the University of São Paulo, Warsaw University and Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne. He is a member of the Committee on Cultural Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has also been active outside of the academic field as a curator and journalist. Sowa has edited and authored several books and published numerous articles in Poland and abroad. A collection of essays "A Joy Forever: Political Economy of Social Creativity", that he co-edited, including articles by Luc Boltanski, Massimiliano Tomba, Isabelle Graw and Gigi Roggero appeared with MayFly Books (London) in 2015. Sowa is the Curator of Discursive Program and Research at the Biennale Warszawa.
