Presenters

• Dr. Philippa Levine

  Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas, University of Texas at Austin

• Themba Lonzi

  Themba Lonzi is a musician, actor, community organizer, activist, and a reconciliation practitioner. Themba was a teenager during the years of South African Apartheid, and was present at many protests and marches. He remembers his youth as an angry time where he was forced to grow up very fast and without many options that were not violent. His path towards reconciliation was paved through his work in the arts, where he found a means to channel his angers at first, and later his compassion.

• Mark Bookman

  Mark Bookman is a historian of disability policy and connected social movements in Japanese and transnational contexts, who is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at Tokyo College. Mark’s research has been supported by numerous grants and awards, including a Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship to Japan and Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship, and his scholarship on disability inclusion can be found in peer-reviewed journals such as Japan Focus: The Asia-Pacific Journal and public-facing media outlets like The Japan Times and Japan Today. Outside of the academy, Mark also works as an accessibility consultant. He has collaborated with government agencies and corporate entities in Japan, the United States, and Canada, as well as the International Paralympic Committee and United Nations, on projects related to inclusive education, equitable transportation, and disaster risk management for diverse populations of disabled people.

• Dr. Rob Wilson

  Rob Wilson is professor of philosophy at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of editor of seven books, including The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (1999) and, most recently, The Eugenic Mind Project (2018). Rob has established a number of community engagement initiatives with a philosophical edge, including founding Philosophy for Children Alberta in 2008, directing the large-scale research project Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada, and, most recently, founding the not-for-profit, Philosophical Engagement in Public Life (PEiPL). His current projects include Keeping Kinship in Mind, funded by the ARC Discovery Program, rebuilding and expanding the EugenicsArchives.ca website, and repairing a bathroom ceiling. Rob was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2009 and is a long-standing member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists.

• Betsy Hartmann

  Betsy Hartmann’s research, writing, and lecturing focuses on the intersections between population, migration, environment, and security issues. During her time at Hampshire College, she served as the director of the Population and Development Program. She is the author of The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War and Our Call to Greatness and the feminist classic Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control as well as two political thrillers about the far right, The Truth about Fire and Deadly Election. She is the co-author of A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village and co-editor of the anthology Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties. In 2015 she was a Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair based in New Delhi, India. She is currently working on a novel about the opiate crisis and war on drugs.

• Asha Nadkarni

  Asha Nadkarni’s research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and theory, transnational feminist theory, US empire studies, and Asian American studies, with an emphasis on the literatures and cultures of the South Asian diaspora. Her book, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), traces connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms to suggest that both launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. She is working on a second book project, tentatively titled From Opium to Outsourcing, that focuses on representations of South Asian labor in a global context.