Zahra Yagana

Zahra Yagana is the Director of Community Development at Bamyan Foundation in Washington DC. Zahra Yagana is also an author and human rights activist who has been advocating for women’s rights, victims of war and terrorist attacks in Afghanistan for the past 14 years. Yagana has worked with various organizations including Armanshahr Afghanistan Studies Organization and the International Federation for Human rights on human rights issues in Afghanistan. Prior to the collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021, Yagana was heavily involved in working with the victims of terrorist attacks in the marginalized Hazara communities in Kabul, such as the attack on the Enlightenment Movement protest, the attack on the maternity ward of a hospital supported by Médecins Sans Frontières, the attacks on Kawsar-Danesh and Mowud academy and the attack on Sayed-ul-Shuhada girls school. Yagana found treatment for the victims and educational opportunities for students who survived the attacks in coordination with charitable organizations both within and outside Afghanistan. She is the founder of the Green Home (IWYGHO), and authored a book, “The Light of Ashes”. Following the Taliban takeover, Yagana fled Afghanistan in search of safety to the United States. Despite the challenges of resettling in the United States, Yagana still maintains contacts with her network in Afghanistan. She obtains regular updates on the ongoing struggles that women and minority groups are constantly confronted with in Afghanistan. Her most recent efforts included reaching out to the minority and underserved communities across Afghanistan and particularly outreach to women and the Hazara minority communities to gather information on the distribution of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan.

Timor Karimy

Timor Karimy is the founder and president of Bamyan Foundation in Washington DC. Born in Afghanistan and raised in the Afghan refugee communities in Pakistan, Karimy worked at the US Embassy in Islamabad and arrived in the Washington DC area after a stint in Malaysia. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech, and works at the US Patent and Trademark Office. Bamyan Foundation is the culmination of Karimy’s long-held goal to establish a U.S. based nonprofit organization with focus on education, humanitarian aid, gender equity, and youth programs in the marginalized and underserved Hazara-inhabited areas of Afghanistan, and community development initiatives among the Hazara diasporas in the United States.

Radmila Popovic

Radmila Popovic is an experienced senior education advisor with a demonstrated history of working in international education projects at World Learning. There, she is a leader in conceptualizing, designing and implementing face-to-face and online pre-service and in-service teacher education programs, as well as a number of projects combining curriculum development and training teachers how to implement new curricular requirements in practice. She has designed and moderated several online courses and MOOCs, including “Teaching Grammar Communicatively” for the Online Professional English Network (OPEN) Program. In 2020/2021, she led three teams of course designers and online instructors who prepared and delivered online English language courses for students and young professionals in Myanmar, English language courses for unemployed youth in Iraq, and English language preparation courses for participants of the Global Undergraduate Exchange Program. Prior to joining World Learning in 2011, she taught courses in ELT Methodology and Second Language Acquisition and supervised undergraduate and graduate students at three different higher education institutions: the University of Belgrade (1998-2011), SIT Graduate Institute in Vermont (2007-2009), and the New School in New York (2009-2010). Dr. Popovic holds a bachelor’s degree in English language and literature from the University of Belgrade, a master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Belgrade, a master’s degree in TESOL from SIT Graduate Institute in Vermont, and a doctorate in applied linguistics from the University of Belgrade.

Alison R. Kokkoros

Alison R. Kokkoros is the Chief Executive Officer at Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School in Washington D.C. Allison Kokkoros is an educator and an ed-entrepreneur at heart who believes in the transformative power of adult education for learners, their children, the workforce, and our society. She brings 20+ years of experience in adult education and immigrant integration to her work at the helm of the Carlos Rosario School. Under her leadership, the School has grown to serve more than 2,500 diverse students annually and expanded to offer new programs and services including Bilingual Teacher Training and the Puentes Exchange Programs with counterpart schools in El Salvador and Ethiopia. Allison serves on the Board’s Strategic Planning & Oversight Committee, and as an ex officio member of the Board, supports all committees and the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Taskforce.

Diya Abdo

Diya Abdo is the Lincoln Financial Professor of English in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Guilford College. A second-generation Palestinian refugee born and raised in Jordan, Dr. Abdo’s teaching, research, and scholarship focus on Arab women writers and Arab and Islamic feminisms. She has also published poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her first book AMERICAN REFUGE: True Stories of the Refugee Experience was published in by Steerforth Press in 2022.

In 2015, Dr. Abdo founded Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR), which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and supporting them in their resettlement. The flagship chapter at Guilford College, now one of several ECAR campuses, has hosted 86 refugees thus far, including 16 Afghan evacuees.

Dr. Abdo is the recipient of the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s Innovation Prize (2021), Campus Compact’s Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award (2019), Gulf South Summit’s Outstanding Service-Learning Collaboration in Higher Education Award (2017), and The Washington Center’s Civic Engagement in Higher Education Award (2017). In 2018, she was named a finalist in the Arab Hope Makers Award. She has been making presentations about ECAR far and wide, including the White House and the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Dr. Abdo sits on the Advisory Board of the Community Sponsorship Hub.

Homeira Qaderi

Homeira Qaderi is a writer, women’s rights activist, and educator. She was born in Afghanistan in the 1980s during the years of the Soviet occupation and grew up during the Taliban regime of 1996-2001. At the age of 13, when school attendance was prohibited, she responded by homeschooling girls and boys. She spent 7 years studying literature in several universities in Iran, including the University of Tehran, and in 2003 she received the Sadegh Hedayat Award in Iran for a short story. This was the first prize ever given in Iran to an Afghan. Back in Kabul since 2011, she taught at Gharjistan University and worked as a senior advisor to two ministers – education, & labor, social affairs, martyrs, and the disabled. She participated in numerous international events as a vocal advocate of equal rights for women in Afghanistan, calling for the need to alleviate poverty and promote better conditions for widows and orphans, and tirelessly working for changes to foster women’s participation in government and in decision making roles. For all this work, she was awarded the Malalai Medal—Afghanistan’s highest civilian honor—for exceptional bravery by Ashraf Ghani, the last president of Afghanistan until the overthrow by the Taliban in 2021.

In 2013, she received her PhD in Persian literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in India. Her doctoral dissertation was on “Reflections of War and Emigration in Stories and Novels of Afghanistan.” Her first book was Noqra, the Daughter of Kabul River, originally published in Tehran in 2009. It received a Literary Award for Prose and was later re-published in Kabul in 2015. In 2015 she took a leave from her university in Kabul to be a writer in residence at the University of Iowa, in its renowned “United Nations of writers” program. All in all, Homeira is the author of seven books, including novels, short stories, and literary criticism, all written in Dari Persian. She has also written six books for children to help revive the art of writing stories for children in Afghanistan. Her memoir titled Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son is her first book to appear in English translation, in 2020 with HarperCollins. It was excerpted by the New York Times and chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best nonfiction books of 2020, and it has been translated into French, Italian, Finnish, and German as well as English.

During the 2021 fall of Kabul, Homeira and her son managed to flee the country and enter the US. For two years now, Homeira has been a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is writing a novel, inspired largely by her own experiences, with the working title “Tell Me Everything.” She continues actively contributing to Afghanistan’s education and culture. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of Ravi-e Zan digital journal, which is published with the help of the majority of her colleagues from Afghanistan. And she teaches creative writing online via The Golden Needle Literary Association (GNLA), which she founded 40 days after the fall of Kabul. This literary circle has more than three hundred students.

Asif Majid

Asif Majid is a theatermaker, educator, researcher, musician, and consultant. He grew up outside Baltimore, with parents from Tanzania and Pakistan. His life and work are rooted in extraordinary engagements with applied theater in the US and the UK, characterized by complex, innovative, and brave programing. Asif is devoted especially to community-based participatory theater with youth, creating immersive, ethnographic, and multimedia performance. He uses a social justice lens in all the work he does and seeks to illuminate the intersection of Islam and performance. He has taught graduate, undergraduate, high school, and middle school students on topics such as transnational movement of conflict and environmental refugees, model minorities in the United States, and anti-Muslim hatred in the UK and the US.

Asif’s university education comes from very diverse institutions, with roots on the East Coast and Georgetown but also the UK. He holds a self-designed BA in Global Peace and Conflict Management from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (2013), an MA in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University (2015), and a PhD in Anthropology, Media, and Performance from The University of Manchester in 2019. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Theater and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut, where he is also Affiliate Faculty in: Anthropology; Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity, and Politics; and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. At the moment, Asif is also an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow with the Social Science Research Council and The Wallace Foundation, with a research project at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, MI. From 2020-21, he was a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow with the San Francisco Arts Commission, where he worked at the intersection of racial justice, city government, and arts funding.. While doing his MA at Georgetown, he was also Research Fellow for the “Myriad Voices” project at The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, a joint initiative between the School of Foreign Service and the Department of Performing Arts. He was also part of the inaugural cohort of Global Lab Fellows  from 2017-19. As a researcher, Asif’s work has been published in numerous scholarly journals, and his book Making Muslimness: Race, Religion, and Performance in Contemporary Manchester is forthcoming with Routledge. Asif’s performance credits are transatlantic.

In the US, he has worked with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, The Stoop (a story-sharing performance space) ),  the social justice-oriented collective Convergence Theatre, and Theatre Prometheus. In the UK, he has worked with the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, Unity Theatre in Liverpool, and Action Transport Theatre (a young people’s theater company working on new production). As an educator, Asif uses online and theatre-based simulations to develop youth’s historical understandings of racism, identity, and conflict. Finally, as a consultant, he helps arts and culture organizations have challenging conversations around racial justice and build structures that move them towards equity, ensuring everyone can have fun while doing this difficult work.

Corinne Seals

Corinne Seals is a Senior Lecturer of Applied Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She received her PhD in Linguistics from Georgetown University in 2013 while working as the Ukrainian Language Representative at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC. Ukrainian-American by birth, Corinne’s work focuses primarily on supporting language maintenance, language rights, and identity for both migrant speakers in the diaspora and Indigenous speakers. All of Corinne’s research includes a focus on community empowerment, which is realized through community-researcher partnerships, community-responsive methodologies, and community-focused outputs. She is the Primary Investigator of a three-year NZ Royal Society grant supporting language education for Māori and Samoan children in New Zealand; Primary Investigator of a two-year cross-disciplinary grant working with Ukrainian refugees and their families; and recently co-PI of a British Academy grant-funded project, bringing together the voices of those in three diaspora communities and artists from each community to create the Belonging in the Diaspora online gallery. 

Gerardo Mazzaferro

Gerardo Mazzaferro is a senior lecturer of linguistics at the University of Turin (Italy). His research interests lie in migration and language. He draws on ideas developed in sociolinguistics of globalization, discourse studies, multilingualism and translanguaging. He also draws on areas like sociolinguistics of immigration and mobility and immobility studies, particularly on processes of (re)construction of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ linguistic practices, subjectivities and identities in contexts of forced (im)mobilization. He uses linguistic ethnography and qualitative research methods and tools. He is the organizer of the International Conference on the Sociolinguistics of Immigration. He works in the NEW ABC-Networking the Educational World Across Boundaries for Community Building-EU-funded project. I am a team member of New ABC-Pilot Action 9 – The International migrations & (im)mobilities: offline/online practices, identities, agency and voice of young migrants. He is also an activist and volunteer in local grassroots organizations involved in the reception and support of asylum seekers and refugees.  

Nadia Hashimi

Nadia Hashimi is an internationally bestselling author whose novels focus on forced migration, conflict, colonialism, and misogyny. An avid reader, Hashimi discovered her passion for writing during her downtime while working as a pediatrician. Hashimi graduated from Brandeis University with degrees in Middle Eastern Studies and Biology, studied medicine at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine, and completed her pediatric residency training at NYU and Bellevue hospitals.
Hashimi’s literary works draw inspiration from her experience as the daughter of Afghan immigrants. Her parents emigrated in the early 1970s before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and she was raised in New Jersey and upstate New York. Her books shed light on the complex experiences of life in Afghanistan and of Afghan migrants; she has written four literary fiction novels—The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, When the Moon is Low, A House Without Windows, and Sparks Like Stars—and two youth fiction novels—One Half from the East and The Sky at Our Feet. Hashimi’s books have been translated into 17 languages. Hashimi also serves as a member of the US-Afghan Women’s Council and as an advisor to Kallion, a nonprofit organization that studies the humanities to benefit leadership education and development.

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