Project Leads

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in Global Culture Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. He leads CoFUTURES.

Joey Eschrich is the editor and program manager at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, and assistant director for Future Tense, a partnership of ASU, Slate magazine, and New America on emerging technologies, culture, and society. He has edited several books of science fiction and nonfiction, including Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, which was funded by a grant from NASA.

Vandana Singh is a professor of physics at Framingham State University, a transdisciplinary scholar of climate change, and a science fiction author. Her short story collection Ambiguity Machines, from Small Beer Press and Zubaan Books, was No. 1 on Publisher’s Weekly’s Top Ten in Science Fiction, was named a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and earned praise from Wired, the Washington Post, and the Seattle Times.

Authors

Gladson Dungdung is an activist, author, researcher, public speaker, and motivator. He is founder of the Adivasis Publications. He comes from the Kharia Adivasi community in Jharkhand (India). He has authored several books, including Endless Cry in the Red Corridor, Mission Saranda: A War for Natural Resources in India, and Whose Country Is It Anyway? – Untold Stories from India’s Indigenous Peoples. He has also published more than 500 articles and spoken globally on indigenous issues. He received the Samata Ratan Award in 2014 for his extraordinary work for the Adivasi communities of India.

Jacinta Kerketta is a poet, writer, and freelance journalist. In her poems, she highlights the injustices committed against Adivasi communities, along with their struggles. Her poems are also important cultural and artistic documents of Adivasi worldviews. She is the author of two bilingual (Hindi and English) full-length collections of poems: Angor (Adivani, Kolkata) and Jodon Ki Jameen (Bharatiya Jnanpith, New Delhi).

Easterine Kire, born in Nagaland, North-east India, has a PhD in English literature from Pune University, India. In 2003, she published the first novel by a Naga writer in English, A Naga village Remembered (Ura Academy). It is now a Speaking Tiger imprint with the new title, Sky is my Father. Kire was awarded the Governor’s medal for excellence in Naga literature (2011), and in 2013 Catalan PEN, Barcelona honoured her with the Free Voice award. Her other novels are, A Terrible Matriarchy (Zubaan 2007) Bitter Wormwood (Zubaan 2011) and When the River Sleeps which won the Hindu Literature for life 2015, and the Gordon Graham Prize for Naga Literature in 2019. Six of her books have been translated to German, and two to Norwegian, and Marathi. Kire’s novels reflect the socio-cultural and historical landscape of Naga society. She has also written five children’s books, several articles and essays. Her book, Son of the Thundercloud (Speaking Tiger) won the Tata Book of the year 2017 and the Bal Sahitya Puraskar 2018 from the Indian Academy of Letters. Kire is interested in historical writing and continues to record and document unwritten oral history in order to rescue and preserve it for future generations.

Mimi Mondal is a speculative fiction writer and editor, and the first Hugo Award nominee from India. Her first book, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited along with Alexandra Pierce, received the Locus Award in Non-fiction in 2018 and was a finalist for the Hugo Award in Best Related Work and the British Fantasy Award in Non-fiction. Between 2017 and 2018, Mimi worked as the Poetry and Reprint Editor of Uncanny Magazine, a three-times-Hugo-Award-winning magazine of science fiction and fantasy. She was also an editor at Penguin India between 2012 and 2013.

Dr. Gogu Shyamala is one of the foremost contemporary Dalit voices in India, and a writer, author, and poet in Telugu. Her English collection of short stories Father May Be an Elephant and Mother Only a Small Basket, But… has been translated into German, and some stories into French. She produced a biography of T.N.Sadalakshmi, the first Dalit woman legislator in Andhra Pradesh. Her earlier volume Nallapoddu (Black Dawn), a collection of Dalit women’s writing from across Andhra Pradesh, has won critical acclaim in the Telugu literary world. She participated in the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001, the Australian Indian Literary Festival in 2013, a literary workshop in Germany in 2016, and in the Jaipur International Festival in 2012. She has worked on issues of domestic violence among Dalit women. She was also a coeditor of The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing. Her writing has been used in higher education syllabi by the government of Telangana and at the University of San Francisco. Her work has been translated into Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, and Urdu. She completed her PhD dissertation, “Reading Caste Histories through Biographies: A Case Study of the Dalit Women of Telangana,” in 2019 at the Department of Social Exclusion Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, Telegana.

Expert Consultants

Rimjhim Aggarwal, Associate Professor, School of Sustainability, and Senior Sustainability Scientist, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University

Robyn Barfoot, Big Cat/Carnivore Specialist

Rohit Chandra, Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Nalini Chhetri, Associate Director and Clinical Associate Professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and Clinical Associate Professor, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University

Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe), Professor, Indigenous Nations Studies Program, Portland State University

Uttaran Dutta, Assistant Professor, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, and Senior Sustainability Scientist, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University

Mayank Kumar teaches history at Satyawati College (Evening), University of Delhi

Joseph Kunkel, Executive Director, Sustainable Native Communities (SNC) Design Lab

Ariane Middel, Assistant Professor, School of Arts, Media and Engineering and School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University

Sahil Nijhawan, British Academy Fellow, Zoological Society of London; ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, University College London

Nancy Selover, Climatologist, State of Arizona, and Research Professor, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University

Mukul Sharma, Professor, Environmental Studies, Ashoka University

Raj Kumar Singh, Assistant Professor, School of Earth, Ocean, and Climate Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar

Rebecca Tsosie, Regents’ Professor, James E. Rogers College of Law, and Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence, University of Arizona; Supreme Court Justice, Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation

Suraj Yengde is one of India’s leading scholars and public intellectuals. He is also an international human rights attorney, currently a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School

Yamini Yogya, PhD student, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University

To learn more, contact Joey Eschrich at jpe@asu.edu