Description:

Natalie Avalos is an assistant professor in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder. She is an ethnographer of religion who received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a special focus on Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions and Tibetan Buddhism. She is currently working on her manuscript titled The Metaphysics of Decoloniality:Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal, which explores urban Indian and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She is a Chicana of Apache descent, born and raised in the Bay Area. 

Dawa T. Lokyitsang is a PhD candidate in the field of cultural anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. Her dissertation research is on the establishment of sovereignty and nationalist subjects in exile by Tibetan refugees through the development of their own educational institutions and the larger diaspora community of Tibetans in India. In addition to her research focus, she is also interested in and has written about ways of belonging (Lokyitsang 2016) that are racialized and gendered (Lokyitsang 2014, 2017a) within the Tibetan diaspora community. Lokyitsang is also concerned with questions of Chinese colonialism and its racialized impact on Tibetan subjectivities in Tibet, Chinese imperialism more broadly (Lokyitsang 2012, 2017b), and the need for decolonization as a necessary praxis still (in Fanon fashion) for counteracting such ongoing mechanics of racialized modern colonialisms and imperialisms (Lokyitsang 2020 [2016]). Her scholarly writings have been featured in Lexington Books with forthcoming work with Oxford University press. Occasionally she writes for Lhakar Diaries, a well-liked blog run by and for Tibetans of which she is a co-founder. Lhakar Diaries is also where you will find most of her writings.