The Speakers

Woods Ervin is an organizer that has been working for over a decade in movements both for trans self-determination as well as prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition. She is originally from Memphis, TN and started organizing in 2007 in Chicago, IL. supporting homeless queer and trans youth at the Broadway Youth Center.  Woods is currently staff at Critical Resistance (CR), an organization dedicated to prison-industrial complex abolition, where she has been a volunteer member since 2010.

As a member of CR, she participated in the grassroots fight to stop gang injunctions in 2011, was a core organizer in the fight to stop new jail construction in San Francisco in 2014 and in 2015, a strategist in the campaign to stop Urban Shield, the largest militarized policing and SWAT training at the time. 

Woods has most recently worked with TGI Justice Project (TGIJP), an abolitionist organization that supports currently and formerly incarcerated trans people,  and engaged in research on the PIC at Interrupting Criminalization (IC), an organization that engages in research and projects to fight the PIC.  While at TGIJP from 2014-2018, she helped develop the internal infrastructure of the organization, growing it in size and capacity to strengthen the organization’s ability to engage in leadership development and campaigning during the initial Black Lives Matter uprisings and mobilizations as well as the movements for transgender rights and liberation. 

During her time at IC, Woods conducted research on rates of incarceration of Black women and girls, the links between COVID responses and imprisonment and the Defund Policing movement. She also supported organizing on the ground in Minneapolis during the 2020 uprisings. 

Woods has both been interviewed for and written for many publications, including Truthout, GQ, The Forge, The LA Times and the Fresno Bee. 

As staff at CR, she is currently working on a campaign to close 10 prisons in California as well as a campaign in New York state to end all contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Prof. Biju Mathew is a prominent labor organizer, co-founding the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) and serving as the founding secretary of the National Taxi Workers Alliance. The organization was created in response to the growing exploitation of taxi drivers in New York City, many of whom were immigrants facing harsh working conditions, low pay, and little to no job security. The success of the NYTWA served as a model for similar organizations across the United States and even internationally. His notable work being Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City (2005), which explores the struggles of taxi workers. 

Biju Mathew’s academic career has been closely intertwined with his activism, allowing him to combine theory with practice in a way that has had a significant impact on the communities he serves. He is a professor at Rider University, where he teaches Information Systems and American Studies. His academic background is rooted in understanding the intersections of technology, labor, and social justice, which has informed much of his work both inside and outside the classroom. His teaching often explores themes of globalization, labor exploitation, and the role of technology in shaping contemporary work environments. This academic focus is reflected in his broader activist efforts, which have consistently aimed at challenging the systemic inequalities faced by workers in the gig economy and beyond.

In addition to his work with taxi workers, Mathew has been deeply involved in transnational solidarity campaigns. He has been active in efforts to monitor and challenge human rights abuses in India, particularly in relation to the treatment of marginalized communities and the rise of Hindu nationalism. Mathew's activism in this area has included work with organizations like the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, which seeks to hold accountable those who finance hate groups and activities in India. His work has often placed him at the intersection of local and global struggles, reflecting his commitment to social justice on a broad scale. His activism, particularly in relation to his critiques of Hindu nationalism, has made him a target of right-wing groups both in the United States and India. Despite these challenges, he has remained steadfast in his commitment to social justice, continuing to speak out against oppression and inequality wherever he sees it.

Mr. Manoj Mitta is an award-winning author, most recently of Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India. His earlier books were on impunity for the two most egregious instances of mass violence in the Indian Republic: Delhi 1984 targeting Sikhs and Gujarat 2002 targeting Muslims. The first, published in 2007 and co-authored with advocate H.S. Phoolka, was When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and its Aftermath. This was followed in the run-up to the 2014 national election by The Fiction of Fact-finding: Modi and Godhra. 

On the same pattern of impunity for mass violence, whether politically inspired or based on social prejudice, his latest book was originally meant to be focused on the massacres of Dalits across India in the wake of the 1950 abolition of untouchability. But the evidence of structural bias underlying those atrocities pushed Mitta to widen the ambit of the book. Published in 2023, Caste Pride is a radically new history of caste, based on previously unseen legislative and judicial records going back over two centuries. 

This ambitious research stretching over seven years was facilitated by two fellowships: one from Washington DC-based National Endowment for Democracy (2015-16) and another from Bengaluru-based New India Foundation (2017-18). Caste Pride has since won two awards for best non-fiction of 2023: Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival and Kalinga Literary Festival. It has also been shortlisted for the best non-fiction award in the upcoming Valley of Words International Literature and Arts Festival at Dehradun. The book is currently being translated into Hindi, Tamil and Marathi.

For the wealth of new material bought out by him on caste and law, Mitta has spoken at several renowned universities in India and the US. These include the four leading universities of California: Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Irvine. Caste Pride has received praise from academic experts. Marc Galanter, Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Wisconsin, has written a blurb saying, “With telling detail and incisive argument, Manoj Mitta’s Caste Pride offers a fresh and penetrating addition to the literature on India’s caste system and on India’s remarkable effort to regulate and transform it.” 

A law graduate from Hyderabad, Mitta is a Delhi-based journalist focused on law, human rights and social justice. He has worked in the Times of India, India Today and the Indian Express.  Married, he has a daughter and a son.

Dr. Sharat G. Lin writes and lectures on global political economy, labor migration, social movements, and public health.  He studied medicine at the American University of Beirut, received his PhD in medical physics at UC Berkeley, and is the author of numerous papers and patents in the medical field. Sharat is a contributing author in the book Studies in Inequality and Social Justice (2009). He served on the editorial boards of Peace Times, South Asian Affairs, Marxism Today, India Forum, and many others.

Sharat has studied and reported on conflicts and uprisings, such as the Lebanese Civil War, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the Arab Spring. He has travelled to many countries with which the U.S. government is at odds in an effort to reveal censored realities, and to build people-to-people friendship, including Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, China, and Russia. Most recently he has been a leading voice in the mobilizations to stop the genocide in Gaza, calling for a permanent ceasefire, divestment, and equality and peaceful coexistence for Israelis and Palestinians.

Sharat's work on dominant-group supremacy considers the inflammatory role of elected officials appealing to dominant-group chauvinism by amplifying perceptions of insecurity while scapegoating other non-dominant identity groups in the context of electoral democracy. This is on top of historical white racism, casteism, and inter-generational trauma. He applies this to neofascism in the U.S. and Europe, right-wing Zionism in Israel and the West, and Hindutva in India, which are finding common ground and forging alarming new alliances.

Sharat is presently affiliated with Human Agenda, the San José Peace & Justice Center, and the Initiative for Equality. He was a cofounder of South Asians for Collective Action and served with such organizations as the Coalition Against Communalism, Vikalp, and Jan Vigyan Samiti. He has long been a prominent community activist for social justice and world peace.