ARIKO S. IKEHARA

Ariko S. Ikehara is the director of the Koza X MiXtopia Research Center in Okinawa. The center functions as a think tank, aiming to create Okinawan futurity by centering Okinawan epistemology. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Osaka University (2017-2019), and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Gender and Women Studies at UC Berkeley (2016). Her peer-reviewed published works are “Champurū Text: Postwar Okinawan Writing,” Beyond American Occupation: Race and Agency in Okinawa, 1945-2015. Lexington Press. 2017., and “Third Space as Decolonial Con/Text: Okinawa’s American Champurū.” Transnational Asia: An Online Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 1-1. Fall, 2016., Chao Center for Asian Studies, Rice University. She is currently working on a book manuscript under the working-title “Teruya Soul MiXtory: A Dramaturgy of Place”, a choreographic study of a place known as the Black district that existed during the American occupation of Okinawa.

KATIE COLFORD

Katie Colford received her B.A. from Yale College in 2016 and is currently in her final year of the M.Arch I programme at the Yale School of Architecture. Her work spans design, research, writing, and teaching. She has worked professionally in New York and Tokyo, and her research has been supported by grants from the Yale Environmental Humanities and others. In addition to her graduate studies, she has been a Teaching Fellow for a number of undergraduate architecture courses at Yale College. Her work can be found at katiecolford.com.

MERVE GÜL ÖZOKCU

Merve Gül Özokçu is an architect, researcher and activist. Her research focuses on commons, creative actions, everyday life narratives and indigenous eco-feminist practices. She is the vice president of the board of the Herkes İçin Mimarlık (Architecture for All) Association, whose aim is to resolve social problems through architecture while searching for alternative ways of practising architecture. She is a part of the Arazi Assembly (2016, Mardin); a research collective consisting of researchers who are involved in a joint effort on different spatial scales focusing on the Southeast region of Turkey. Arazi considers collective research as a form of knowledge production achieving decolonisation, care and solidarity. Currently, she is a grant holder of the IASPIS Studio and Istanbul Design Biennial’s Designing Resilience programme.

RUKEN AYDOĞDU

Ruken Aydoğdu is an architect. Living and working in Diyarbakır, she focuses her work and production on such fields as the city, architecture and ecofeminism. She is a co-founding member of the RE-Design architecture agency. Through her artistic work, as a resident of Diyarbakır, a city placed in a region marked by violence, Aydoğdu strives to place her focus on and highlight the places where violence is visible, the stories that take shape in these places, the archeological/architectural strata, the shapes of resistance and the forms that make them visible to us. Aydoğdu, who completed her architecture education at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Mardin Artuklu University, is currently completing her Masters at the Dicle University. After having worked as a volunteer for the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2019, Aydoğdu became a member of the artists’ and researchers’ collective Arazi Assembly and the Board of Administration of the Diyarbakır Chamber of Architects.