H. L. T. Quan is a political theorist and an award-winning filmmaker. She is an Associate Professor of Justice and Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Quan is the author of Growth Against Democracy: Savage Developmentalism in the Modern World and editor of Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the associate director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. She is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, and has served as the chair of the American Studies Association and received the 'Angela Davis Award for Public Scholarship'.