Payal Arora is the author of several books including Dot Com Mantra: Social Computing in the Central Himalayas (Ashgate, 2010) and The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2014; Winner of the EUR Fellowship Award) as well as co-author of The Shape of Diversity to Come: Crossroads in New media, Identity & Law (in press; Palgrave) and Poor@Play: Digital Life beyond the West (expected 2016; Harvard University Press). Her paper on digitization of information won the 2010 Best Paper Award in Social Informatics by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Her focus and expertise lies in the anthropology and sociology of new technologies, specifically their digital cultures and social activism. She has consulted for both the private and public sector worldwide including with Shell, World Bank, hp, National Health Foundation, The Ministry of Education in Jordan, Sotheby’s, Art Review, Kellogg and the Beirut Chambers of Commerce. She is currently a GE Fellow on the Industrial Internet Project. She sits on several boards including the Global Media Journal, The South Asian Media, Arts & Culture Research Center in University of North Texas, Young Erasmus, Makerocity, and The World Women Global Council in New York. She holds degrees from Harvard University (M.Ed., International Policy) and Columbia University (PhD, Language, Literacy & Technology). She is currently based in the Department of Media and Communication, Faculty of History, Culture and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. For more detail, please check her website: www.payalarora.com
Carolyn Chen is associate professor of sociology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton 2008) and co-editor of the book Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Religion, and Ethnicity among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (NYU 2012). She has written in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times about Asian Americans and college admissions. She is currently writing a book called Zen and the Art of Corporate Productivity about the culture of Asian spirituality in Silicon Valley companies.
Jason Keith Fernandes is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for International Studies (CIE) at ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon. Subsequent to a degree in law and a Master’s degree in the sociology of law, Jason was recently awarded a doctorate in anthropology for a dissertation on The Citizenship Experiences of Goan Catholics. With a Fellowship from the New India Foundation, he is in the process of writing a book manuscript around language and politics in post-colonial Goa.
Dr. Jenny Chio is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, USA, where she teaches courses on contemporary China, visual anthropology, critical tourism studies, and the anthropology of media. She completed her Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has recently published a monograph, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China (University of Washington Press, 2014), and directed an ethnographic film on tourism in two ethnic villages in China, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness (distributed by Berkeley Media, 2013).
