Jarius Grove is the Director of the Hawai’i Research Center for Future Studies and an Assistant Professor in Political Science for the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

I grew up in Texas and went on to attend the University of Texas at Austin’s History Program. After five years of coaching college debate, I returned to school at Johns Hopkins University to pursue a Ph.D. in International Relations. I finished my Ph.D. in 2011 and joined the Mānoa faculty the same year.

My work so far has centered on the ecology and future of global warfare. I am interested in the ways war continues to expand, bringing an ever greater collection of participants and technologies into the gravitational pull of violent conflict. I am also interested in various approaches to global relations such as systems theory, cybernetics, and complexity theory, as well as the role new media play in altering the interface with global relations. In my spare time, I collect vinyl and co-edit The Contemporary Condition with William E. Connolly.

Noelani Goodyear–Ka‘ōpua, He Kanaka ʻŌiwi Hawaiʻi au. ʻO Oʻahu kuʻu one hānau. My genealogy also connects my ʻohana to Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, and Maui islands, as well as to Southern China and the British Midlands. My academic work is one part of a lifetime commitment to aloha ʻāina—politically-engaged loving care for Hawaiʻi and for Indigenous relationships with place. I value and prioritize collaborative and community-engaged scholarship. I continue to be interested in Indigenous social movements, participatory & activist research methods, and Hawaiian sovereignty. My work is increasingly influenced by a pressing concern about the intersections of energy and food politics with Indigenous social and political health. My previous research projects have involved documenting, analyzing, and proliferating the ways people are transforming imperial and settler colonial relations through Indigenous political values and initiatives. I have been involved in and written about the creation of Native Hawaiian culture-based schooling. My first book, The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), discusses some of the tensions of designing and implementing Indigenous culture- and land-based educational initiatives within and against settler state structures.

Debora Halbert is currently serving as Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. she completed her B.A. (1989) and M.A. (1992) at Western Washington University and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (1996). Upon graduation from UH, she accepted a tenure track job at Otterbein College, a small liberal arts college outside of Columbus, Ohio, where she taught in the Department of History and Political Science for twelve years. Since 1996, she has taught courses across the discipline. She is especially interested in courses on technology law and policy, public policy, futures studies, legal studies, environmental politics, and the underlying theoretical foundations for these topics. In 2008, she returned to the Political Science department at UH, where she now teaches futures studies, constitutional law, public policy, and law and society.

Her scholarship focuses on the politics of intellectual property and has published two books on the subject, Intellectual Property in the Information Age: The Politics of Expanding Property Rights (Quorum, 1999) and Resisting Intellectual Property (Routledge, 2005). Her third book The State of Copyright (Routledge) will appear in 2014. This book investigates the intersection of expanding intellectual property laws, national culture, and the international political economy of intellectual property. Aside from her ongoing work on intellectual property issues, she has an interest in expatriatism and its connection to the nation-state. This project is ongoing.

Carolyn Stephenson received a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and a Ph.D. from Ohio State (1980). Before coming to UH in 1985 she was Director of Peace Studies at Colgate University, and a Scholar–in–Residence at Radcliffe.

She is currently a member of the graduate faculty in Population Studies, where she teaches on gender, population, and the environment, and participate in the Program on Conflict Resolution. She also directs the Hawai’i Model United Nations, in which graduate student involvement is welcome.

Jenifer Sunrise Winter is an Associate Proessor and Gradate Chair of the School of Communications and co-Director of the Pacific ICTD Colaborativev. She received the AB from the Ocidental College and the MLIS and PhD in Communication and Information Sciences from the University of Hawaii.

Her research examines how increased instrumentation and tracking of natural and social processes (e.g., the Internet of Things) enable the construction of unique data profiles that may expose personal information that could be used by corporations or governments to disadvantage certain individuals or groups. She studies how these developments may create unjust power differentials used by one group to diminish the opportunities of another, threaten to destroy anonymity when engaging in public affairs, and hinder public participation in democratic discourse. She is also interested in open data, in particular how it can be harnessed for the public good, while minimizing the risks of re-identification of personal data.

Jim Dator is Professor and Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Department of Political Science, and Adjunct Professor in the Program in Public Administration, the College of Architecture, and the Center for Japanese Studies, of the University of Hawaii at Manoa; Co-Chair, Space and Society Division, International Space University, Strasbourg, France; former President, World Futures Studies Federation; Fellow and former member of the Executive Council, World Academy of Art and Science.

He also taught at Rikkyo University (Tokyo, for six years), the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, the University of Toronto, and the InterUniversity Consortium for Postgraduate Studies in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia.

He received a BA in Ancient and Medieval History and Philosophy from Stetson University, an MA in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in Political Science from The American University. He did post graduate work at Virginia Theological Seminary (Ethics and Church History), Yale University (Japanese Language), The University of Michigan (Linguistics and Quantitative Methods), Southern Methodist University (Mathematical Applications in Political Science).

He is a Danforth Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and Fulbright Fellow.