Mohammad Ebad Athar is a Ph.D. candidate in history and a graduate research associate in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs South Asia Center in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Athar’s dissertation examines the global impact of the post-9/11 period for the South Asian diaspora in the United States and the Persian Gulf. In drawing connections between those regions, Athar hopes to illustrate how South Asian identity has been secularized across transnational borders and how South Asian political activism has resisted that framework.

Olivia Boyer is a second-year magazine, news and digital journalism major in the Newhouse School, with a minor in South Asian studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Boyer has been involved in several on-campus publications, including The Daily Orange and University Girl. She has served since January as a research assistant for Husain, analyzing news media coverage of the war on terror and its impact. The Akron, Ohio, native’s interests include civic engagement, social justice, storytelling and fashion.

Azadeh Ghanizadeh is a Ph.D. candidate in writing studies, rhetoric and composition in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her dissertation focuses on media representations of refugees in the United States through film, public service announcements and United Nations celebrity endorsements. Her work challenges prevailing assumptions about multiculturalism and migration by examining how American media portray forced migration and how those portrayals affect public policy. Ghanizadeh holds degrees from the University of Oregon and Oregon State University. She has taught courses in critical thinking and composition, introductory and intermediate college writing and Middle East studies at Oregon State, Syracuse and Colgate Universities.

Mary Hanrahan is a communication and rhetorical studies master’s student in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. She researches how structures of power are articulated through cultural texts and how texts mutate, enforce or disrupt systems of privilege and oppression. Hanrahan is interested in narrative reclamation and communications from communities experiencing surveillance and containment. She also investigates Islamophobic biases in the news media, their impact on marginalized groups and how affected communities work around the consequences of those biases.

Tia Poquette is a third-year policy studies major in the Maxwell School and College of Arts and Sciences, with double minors in architecture in the School of Architecture and sociology in the Maxwell School. Poquette is interested in urban policy, sustainability, social justice and criminal justice. She has interned with the nonprofit Hudson Yards Hell’s Kitchen Alliance and Youth Public History Institute. Her work there focused on community building and the history of prisons and policing, as well as their contemporary connections. She serves as a teaching assistant for Introduction to Public Policy Analysis.