Xuexin Cai grew up in a farming family in northwest China, where his parents cultivated vegetables and fruits in fields both nourished and threatened by the Yellow River. There, his interest in agriculture and in relations between human beings and the more-than-human world first took root. At 15, he left what had become a disappearing village on the edge of a rapidly expanding industrial city to continue his education in Singapore on a scholarship. He later completed his undergraduate studies in the Middle East on another scholarship before returning to China to live and work in Yunnan, a mountainous province in the southwest and the focus of his undergraduate research on tea production and trade.
In Yunnan, Xuexin served as a teacher and vice principal of a village primary school in a multiethnic region, where he began learning from local residents about the socioeconomic and environmental challenges experienced by different generations and ethnic communities. He also began collaborating with friends, colleagues, and local and external partners to build a safer, healthier, and more diverse and sustainable learning and living environment for students and teachers. These years in Yunnan profoundly shaped his research interests and methods, paving the way for his current doctoral work at Columbia University.
Xuexin's PhD research combines archival and ethnographic approaches to explore the socio-environmental history of southern Yunnan, one of the world’s most biologically and culturally diverse regions. Just as his research is deeply rooted in place while attentive to transregional forces and comparative perspectives, Xuexin believes in the power of place-based learning that engages thoughtfully with issues across spatial scales. In both his scholarship and teaching, he strives to break down the artificial boundaries between intellectual and manual work, and between the human and the natural.
Mako Miura is a doctoral student in the Anthropology and Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist in training, studying the interactions among young children in multicultural and multilingual early childhood classrooms in Osaka, Japan. Her dissertation research examines what happens when two- and three-year-old children from Vietnam, China, South Korea, and the Philippines who draw on a multimodal mix of verbal and extraverbal expressions spend time with one another in Japanese classrooms with peers speaking different languages.
A doctoral student in Columbia University's Department of Religion, Catherine Miki Otachime approaches the study of religion through a deeply interdisciplinary and intercultural lens, with a particular focus on the premodern world. Her research explores the affective and sensory dimensions of faith—how religious systems shape perception, cognition, and embodiment across cultures. She is especially interested in non-rational modes of knowing—ritual, sound, image, and symbol—that challenge dominant epistemologies and offer alternative ways of engaging with the world.
Catherine is currently examining the cultural and religious interactions between medieval and early modern Japan and the Mediterranean world. More specifically, her current work centers on early modern encounters between Japanese and Iberian missionaries, leaders, merchants, investigating how visual, auditory, and ceremonial practices mediated dialogue between polytheistic and monotheistic traditions. She examines how religious and aesthetic frameworks translated complex metaphysical ideas across linguistic, cultural, and ideological boundaries.
Catherine’s academic background spans literature, art history, anthropology, Japanese religions (Shinto and Buddhism), and the fine arts—including painting and traditional woodblock printing. She has studied in Brazil, Japan, France, and the United States.