Dan Smyer Yü is Kuige Professor of Ethnology at the School of Ethnology and Sociology and the National Centre for Borderlands Ethnic Studies in Southwest China at Yunnan University, China and a member of the International Faculty Program at Die Universität zu Köln, Germany. He specializes in religion and ecology, environmental humanities, trans-Himalayan studies, sacred landscapes, and modern Tibetan studies. He currently serves as a member of the Advisory Group of Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology and as an elected board member of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. He is the author of Mindscaping the Landscape of Tibet: Place, Memorability, Eco-aesthetics (2015), and the co-editor of Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability (Routledge 2021).

Karin Dean is Senior Researcher at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia. Trained as a political geographer at the National University of Singapore, her research interests include boundaries, borderlands, practices of b/ordering, power topologies, and, more recently, the spatial effects of large-scale infrastructure development in Yunnan and northeast India. She has worked in conflict resolution and conducted extensive academic fieldwork at most of Myanmar's borderlands, and published in multiple journals and books, including Political Geography, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Surveillance and Society, Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies, and the Routledge Handbook on Asian Borderlands.