James C. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science, Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. He lives on a farm in Durham, Connecticut and was, for 22 years, a sheep breeder and shearer. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In 2020, he was awarded the Albert O. Hirschman Prize by the Social Science Research Council. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. His books include Weapons of the Weak, 1980, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 1985, Seeing Like a State, 1998, The Art of Not Being Governed, 2009, Two Cheers for Anarchism, 2013, and Against the Grain, 2017. He formally retired in July 2021 and now calls himself “professor demeritus”. He is working on an eco-biography of the Ayeyarwady River. His Burmese name is ရွှေ ရိုး .
Tun Myint, Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Carleton College, U.S.A. He was a student activist during the 1988 democracy movement in Myanmar and served as a member of the Technical Advisory Team of the Federal Constitution Drafting Coordinating Committee from 2003 to 2007. He is a founder and member of the editorial board of the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship, director of the Public Memory of Myanmar digital archive at Carleton College, and is the author a book, Governing International Rivers: Polycentric Politics in the Mekong and the Rhine. He co-founded Mutual Aid Myanmar after the military coup to support the Civil Disobedience Movement.
Wai Moe is a former prisoner of conscience turned journalist, who has written for The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Washington Post, The Thomson Reuters Foundation, The Irrawaddy and other outlets.
Michael W. Charney is Professor of Asian and Military History at both the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy and the Department of History at SOAS, University of London. He has worked on the history of Myanmar, and particularly Rakhine State (Arakan), for thirty years and is the author of four monographs on the history of the country. He is also on the Board of Directors of the INGO, Forces for Renewal for Southeast Asia.
Htet Min Lwin is a doctoral student in Religious Studies at York University, Toronto. He received an MA degree in political science from the Central European University, Budapest, with a thesis on the trajectory of Ma Ba Tha. He was previously founding country director (2016-2020) of the Forum of Federations Myanmar Office, working with many major stakeholders on federalism/decentralization and local governance. His interests are in the intersections of religion and politics, religious ideology, Buddhism, social movements, participatory democracy, decentralization/federalism, culture, Burmese political philosophy, and Southeast Asia.
Nikita Gehlot has an M.Phil. Degree and is currently doing a PhD in Political Geography at the Jawaharlal Nehru University of New Delhi. Her research studies narratives of border crossings by Rohingya refugee women living in India and reflects on how the categories of citizenship and statelessness are understood from the perspective of women migrants in the context of forced migration and gender-based violence. Nikita is particularly interested in citizenship, statelessness, women, border crossings, forced migration, and gender-based violence.
Elliott Prasse-Freeman is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD from Yale University’s Department of Anthropology based on long-term fieldwork in Myanmar on Burmese subaltern political thought and activism. He is the co-editor of Unraveling Myanmar’s Transition: Progress, Retrenchment, and Ambiguity Amidst Liberalization (NUS Press, 2020) and is working on book projects on Burmese activism and mass violence against the Rohingya, respectively.
Joshua was educated in the United States and has published book chapters and journal articles in Asia, Europe, and North America.
Ritesh Kumar Jaiswal is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, JDM College, University of Delhi. He received his PhD from the Department of History, University of Delhi. Previously, he has been a Fellow at the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), 2019-20; Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History(WIGH), Harvard University 2017-18, and a Volkswagen Global History Fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, Germany, 2017. His research and teaching interests include labor history, the global history of migrations, history of the Indian diaspora, indentured and non-indentured systems of Indian migration, Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean studies, the history of modern India, and modern European and American history.
Shae Frydenlund is a feminist economic geographer whose research on labor and forced displacement is informed by questions of racialization and gendered inequality. Her work has been published in the Journal of Cultural Geography, Geoforum, and Himalaya: Journal of the Association of Nepal and Himalaya Studies. She earned her PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder and is a Global Shifts postdoctoral fellow at UPenn Perry World House and the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies.
Shunn Lei is a feminist activist and researcher from Yangon.
Tharaphi Than is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of World Languages and Cultures and Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University. Her research interests include women, gender, feminism, dissent, print media, and cartoons. Along with feminists from Myanmar and India, she is working on Field Feminisms, an edited volume to be published by Amsterdam University Press. She is also one of the editors for Humanities across Borders: A Methodologies Book Series to be published by the same press. She spends three-quarters of the year in the US and another quarter in Myanmar or traveling.
Dr Ma Thida is a surgeon and writer who still practices both of her careers in Burma. In addition to working at a nonprofit hospital and clinic, she is also an editor and publisher of a youth magazine in Yangon and has written mostly short stories since her late teenage years. Her first novel, The Sunflower, is in Burmese, and she also writes in English sometimes. She writes commentary for fifty short stories monthly at one reputable Burmese literature magazine. Though she is mainly recognized as a short story writer, she now writes many non-fiction articles. She was in prison from 1993 to 1999 for her political activities in Burma. Thida has been awarded a Babara Goldsmith Freedom to Write award, Reebok Human Rights Award, and American Association of Arts and Science’s honored award in 1996 and 1997 while she was in prison. Her works have been translated into the English, Japanese, Catalonia, and Macedonian languages. She was a Radcliffe fellowship fellow in 2009-10 and now is a visiting scholar at the Southeast Asia study council at Yale University.
Aiden Moe was one of the Myaung Mya Youth Network’s founders in 2012, together with three youth activists. In 2016, Aiden co-founded Burma Monitor and worked as the Program Director until 2018. Burma Monitor extensively monitors hate speech and disinformation in Myanmar, publishes the peace process daily journal and runs counter-disinformation campaigns. Since 2018 October, Aiden has been working for the Myanmar Tech Accountability Network (MTAN) as Technical Advisor. MTAN is a network of Myanmar civil society organizations coordinating efforts to mitigate the risk of social media-induced violence and political instability in Myanmar.
Moe Htet Nay is a former student activist.
Khet Thi is the pseudonym of Zaw Tun, a native of Pale Township, Monywa. He was a political activist who actively took part in historical political movements such as the 1996 student uprising and the 2007 saffron revolution. He was a protest leader in the spring revolution of 2021 until he was arrested by soldiers on 8 May in Shwebo Township. He was tortured to death by 9am the next day, 9 May 2021.