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About the authors

Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan met as students at U.C. Berkeley, where they both earned PhDs in Rhetoric.

  • is a writer, philosopher, and activist. With a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley, they have taught at Bard, Princeton, and New York state prisons. They are the co-founder of the Activist Graduate School, and the co-creator of AI for the People, an award-winning, multi-disciplinary vision of an ecological human-AI symbiosis. As assistant editor of The Philosopher magazine, they published a regular column and interviewed prominent public intellectuals. Chi has lived and traveled around the world. They now make their home in the Hudson Valley, NY, where they write, homeschool their two kids, grow vegetables, and organize Covid-safer events in their community. More here.

A smiling Indian-American woman sitting outdoors, wearing a patterned sleeveless dress and jewelry, black and white photo.

  • is an assistant professor of English and Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is author of the monograph Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (Columbia UP, 2025) and a book of public-facing essays, What is We? (Agenda, 2025), as well as a co-editor of the award-winning Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (UC Press, 2023). A former magazine editor and freelance essayist, Ragini has bylines in over four dozen scholarly and public venues, including online at the New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books. More here.