Sonali Sangeeta Balajee

Sonali Sangeeta Balajee (she / her) is a mother, daughter of Sri Lankan and Indian immigrants, a teaching artist, activist, organizer, and emerging health practitioner. She is the founder of Our Bodhi Project (Bodhi), which focuses on the intersection of Belonging, Organizing, Decomposing, Collective Health and Interconnectedness. Bodhi and the Embodying Belonging and Coliberation frame (the project’s centerpiece) stem from her active research as a Senior Fellow with the Othering and Belonging Institute with UC Berkeley. Sonali spent 13 years for Multnomah County and City of Portland as a senior policy advisor on equity and empowerment, as manager of a health equity program and of a City-wide community-visioning project. She has spent over 10 years of community organizing in the areas of youth organizing, arts, queer liberation, HIV/AIDS issues, and environmental justice. Sonali served as a healing practitioner with the W.K.Kellogg Truth, Reconciliation, and Healing Initiative, and serves on the boards of World Trust and Bioneers. Her life's work has sought to integrate her various influences, cultures, grounding in earth-and-cosmos-based practices, and experiences of spirituality in multiple forms. Our current moments of social and environmental oppression, decomposing, heartbreak, and transformation call Sonali to offer and learn through such integrative and collectively liberating practices.

Sarah Amsler, Ph.D.

Sarah Amsler (she/her) is a politically engaged teacher, writer, researcher and mother. She is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham, UK and a member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures art-ecology-research collective. Her work is dedicated to understanding how systems of modern power perpetuate deep patterns of interpersonal and systemic harm that alienate us from ourselves, each other and the rest of nature (including white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy and instrumental reason in relationships and institutions). Her research and writing focus on learning with the ‘otherwise’, ontological politics in projects for systemic social and ecological justice, pedagogies of relational liberation, countering coloniality in educational theory and practice, and biopoethics as a pedagogy for healing separability.