Rebecca Alexander is an Associate Professor of Education Studies at DePauw University. Her research focuses on segregated schools and communities and the ways in which young people and their families use processes of border crossing and border making to grapple with social, spatial and educational dispossession. Drawing on themes of educational sovereignty, decoloniality, and illegality she looks at how communities contest marginalization and force assimilation and work to defend and sustain critical educational spaces and frameworks.  Recent publications include “A Mama No La Vas a Llevar en la Maleta: Undocumented Parents Crossing and Contesting Borders for their Children’s Education,” “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn in Research and Praxis: Advancing New Understandings of the Community-School Relation in Latina/o Parent Involvement” and “Equity Issues in Parental and Community Involvement in Schools: What Teacher Educators Need to Know.”

Cristen Dávalos is an Assistant Professor in International Relations at the Social Sciences and Humanities College of the Universidad San Francisco (Quito, Ecuador) where she teaches Introduction to International Relations, Introduction to Quantitative and Qualitative Methods, Political Economy of Inequality, as well as Gender and Development.

Dávalos holds a BA in International Relations from Lake Forest College (USA), a MA degree in Development studies from the International Institute of Social Studies (The Netherlands), and a PhD in the School of Political Science and International Relations and the School of Geography from Queen Mary, University of London (UK). 

Nellie grew up on the borderlands, traditional Hia-Ced O’odham territory, just West of the Tohono O’odham reservation and North of Sonora, Mexico. She is currently undertaking a number of projects documenting the historical and legal significance of indigenous peoples on the borderlands. Her research interests include stories that document indigenous relations across international borders, inspired by her own family history. 

Jennifer Johnson joined Kenyon in 2005 after completing her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Her research, past and present, explores how and under what conditions ordinary citizens take the law into their own hands or administer justice informally, and what this can tell us about changing understandings of citizenship. As a graduate student and Fulbright scholar, she studied extralegal justice movements in rural southern Mexico, returning to indigenous communities she had become familiar with before graduate school as an international development worker based in Washington, D.C., and Mexico. Portions of her dissertation have been published by Russell Sage Foundation and Routledge presses, and appear in a Spanish-language anthology she co-edited with U.S. and Mexican scholars.

Irene López is trained as a clinical and cross-cultural psychologist who joined Kenyon in 2007. Her areas of specialty are cross-cultural psychopathology, specifically within the areas of trauma and violence. Born and raised in the Bronx, she has received a number of awards for her teaching and research, including the Kenyon College Trustee Teaching Excellence Award, the Harvey F. Lodish Junior Faculty Development Professor in the Natural Sciences, and the APA Division 52 Henry David International Mentoring Award. Most recently, she completed a Fulbright in Hungary where she lectured on the psychology of immigration. She is the co-editor of a new text on global learning, titled The Wiley Handbook of Collaborative Online Learning and Intercultural Engagement (2022), with Prof. Deirdre Johnston of Hope College.  More information about her work can be found at www.irenelopezphd.com

Professor Miller's teaching and research are dedicated to amplifying the voices of migrants and allowing them to narrate their own experiences. He focuses on returned Turkish migrants who participated in European guest worker programs. Through interviews, he uses their accounts to challenge narratives

developed by both sending and receiving states to characterize the role of migrants in their respective societies. Privileging self-narrated migrant and refugee experiences also drives his teaching. For example, students in his Migrants and Refugees in the 20th Century course study the history of (im)mobility and then, following IRB training and requirements, conduct oral history interviews with migrants and refugees in Northwest Pennsylvania. Students also develop analytical essays based upon their (and past students’) interviews. These interviews and student essays are digitally available to the public and offer a forum to disrupt and challenge public perceptions of migrants and refugees currently dominating the local and global media.

Moledina is a Professor of Economics and co-founder of the Social Entrepreneurship (SE) program at the College of Wooster. SE uses collaborative experiential learning to catalyze the academy and social enterprises to create social change. Leading an intercultural and intergenerational team he expanded SE globally, and was recognized for excellence by the Institute of International Education. Over the years, he have served as Chair of the Economics Department, the Global and International Studies Program, and the faculty co-director of the Center for Diversity and Inclusion. In 2016, Moledina co-conceptualized "Challenging Borders: A Research and Learning Community on Mobility and Movement".

Dr. Betty Okwako-Reikkola is an Associate Professor of Education at Albion College. She holds a doctorate in Curriculum, Instruction and Teacher Education from Michigan State University. Dr. Okwako-Reikkola has worked extensively with pre-service teachers and taught a variety of teacher education courses. Dr. Okwako-Reikkola was a high school teacher in Kenya before migrating to the United States to pursue graduate studies. Her research focuses on the ways in which immigrant students from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds navigate school once they relocate in the United States.

Professor Perez conducts ethnographic research focused on the role of churches and religious communities in Latina/o organizing and political and social life in Northeast Ohio. Specifically, she

documents the increasing number of public sanctuary cases in Ohio and the kinds of relationships and organizing that develops across race, citizenship, religious denomination, ethnicity and class to support challenges facing Latina/o communities in the region. This research includes interviewing sanctuary leaders in Ohio, Tucson, Arizona, and the Bay Area in Northern California, and makes a case for expanding the ways we conceptualize borderlands and migration to include not only the geographic space of Northeast Ohio, but also what some scholars have referred to as the “religious borderlands” that have emerged and are produced in response to heightened immigrant detention, enforcement, and additional modes of marginalization. As a cultural anthropologist with extensive teaching and research experience in heterogeneous Latina/o communities, Professor Perez’s research engages with questions of border-spanning transnational practices and inform my development of community-based learning/research courses at Oberlin College like “Sanctuary, Solidarity, and Latina/o Practices of Accompaniment” and “Latina/o Oral History.”

Nancy Powers is the associate director of the Center for the Study of American Democracy at Kenyon College and a member of the political science faculty there, where she teaches courses on immigration, Latin American politics, global poverty, and Latines in American politics. Her interest in migrants' lives began when she worked for four years in Florida as an organizer and advocate for the human rights of farmworkers.

Professor Shammin has been studying energy solutions and climate change adaptation initiatives in Bangladesh for over a decade. In recent years, he has been working with international agencies on developing a framework for resilient and sustainable solutions for refugee camp environmental management - in the context of the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh. He has since expanded his research on refugee camp environmental management and resilience building among the refugee population. In 2020-21, he pioneered the use of environmental oral history methodologies at the Rohingya refugee camps in the Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh. Most recently, he is involved in a research and implementation initiative to foster youth engagement in community-based environmental problem solving. While the refugees confined in camps around the world await some kind of durable solution, Dr. Shammin’s research is situated in initiatives to improve environmental conditions, engage refugee population in meaningful endeavors, and purposefully infuse resilience building in refugee response. Dr. Shammin has developed an upper-level seminar titled Migration, Refugees and Resilience at Oberlin College.

Taku Suzuki is Professor of International Studies, East Asian Studies, and Global Health at Denison University. Trained in cultural anthropology, he has conducted ethnographic research on such topics as ethnic and national identity formations among the Okinawan migrants in Bolivia and Okinawan-Bolivian migrants in Japan, anti-military peace activism and educational tourism in Okinawa, and the politics of memory and memorialization among the post-WWII Okinawan repatriates from the former Japanese colonies in the western Pacific. Currently, he is part of a collaborative research team that includes the Ohio State University faculty members and a National Institute of Health fellow on digital divide in Central Ohio’s Bhutanese refugee community, and writing a monograph based on his ethnographic field research on the struggles, survival tactics, and insurgent citizenship among the migrants and asylum seekers in Japan with contingent and limited legal status and the Japanese civil society that supports their struggles.

Francisco J. Villegas is Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Kalamazoo College. He completed his PhD in Sociology of Education in 2014 at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. His research interests include immigration, race, citizenship, social movements and policy analysis. He is particularly interested in the ways communities come together to construct policy, processes, and procedures as well as the labor necessary to implement and reassess their efficacy.

Chryssanthi Zachou is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Head of the Sociology Department at the American College of Greece-Deree. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Essex, UK. She has taught courses and conducted research on issues that reflect her scholarly interests on migration, forced displacement and transnational mobility; social movements and civil society organizations; gender, religion and the media. Her recent research interests focus on the challenges that refugees and asylum seekers face in Greece. She has published books, academic articles and chapters in edited volumes in English and Greek and has presented papers in many international conferences. Chryssa is an active member of the International Sociological Association (ISA), a founding member of the Hellenic Sociological Society and an elected member of its executive board. She is also the editor of the journal Greek Sociological Review.