Samar Al-Bulushi is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her current book project (provisionally titled Citizen-Suspect: Militarism, Race and Geopolitics in the East African Warscape) draws on ethnographic research in Kenya to explore the relationship between the imaginative and grounded geographies of the so-called “War on Terror” in East Africa. She is a contributing editor at Africa is a Country and her work has appeared in public outlets such as The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, Intercepted, Jacobin, and Pambazuka News.

Darryl Li is an assistant professor of anthropology and associate member of the law school at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press, 2020) and an attorney licensed in Illinois and New York.

John Muthyala teaches in the English Department, University of Southern Maine, where he leads the USM Digital Humanities Initiative, which creatively uses digital tools to enhance research and scholarship at the intersection of Information Technology and the arts/humanities. John is currently leading two projects: one involves generating the digital footprint of the university and designing an information ecology, and the other focuses on 21st century literacies and the futures of public higher education. His books include Reworlding America: Myth, History, and Narrative, and Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization. He has published, of late, on new directions in the digital humanities, digital innovation in the liberal arts, and global surveillance in the era of drone warfare.

Darren Byler is an incoming Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia and a post-doctoral research fellow in the China Made Project at the Center for Asian Studies, CU Boulder. He is the author of a forthcoming ethnography titled Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press 2021) and a narrative-driven book titled In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports 2021). His current research interests are focused on infrastructure development and global China in the context of Xinjiang and Malaysia.

Charlton McIlwain is the author of the new book, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter. He is Vice Provost for Faculty Development & Engagement at New York University, and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. His work focuses on the intersections of computing technology, race, inequality, and racial justice activism. He has served as an expert witness in landmark U.S. Federal Court cases on reverse redlining/racial targeting in mortgage lending, and recently testified before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services about the impacts of automation and artificial intelligence on the financial services sector. He writes regularly for outlets such as The Guardian, Slate’s Future Tense, MIT Technology Review and other outlets about the intersection of race and technology.

Helga Tawil-Souri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU. Helga’s work deals with spatiality, technology, and politics in the Middle East, with a particular focus on contemporary life in Palestine-Israel. She is interested in how media technologies and infrastructures function as bordering mechanisms, and, conversely, how territorial and physical boundaries or objects function as cultural and mediated spaces. She is the editor of Gaza As Metaphor (Hurst, 2016), and is currently beginning long-term research on turnstiles and experimenting with collage art.