Alexandra Gessesse is a doctoral student in the Department of African American & African Diasporic Studies at UC Berkeley. Inspired by her ancestors, elders, and colleagues, her research explores the changing social, political, and racial dynamics of Black immigrants’ identities, their spatialites, and orientations. More broadly, Alexandra’s research interests include urban policy, social movements in the U.S., Black intellectuals, race and inequality, community and neighborhood organizations, and the African Diaspora. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Black Studies in...
Rachel Anspach is a doctoral student in Berkeley’s African American Studies department who hails from Chicago by way of Brooklyn. She is also an independent journalist whose work on the intersections of race, gender and sexuality in American politics has been published in outlets such as Teen Vogue, Slate, Jezebel and Rewire. Rachel previously served as Senior Editor & Writer for the African American Policy Forum, an intersectional feminist think tank at Columbia Law School, where she co-authored ...
Franchesca Araújo is a Ph.D. candidate in African American & African Diaspora Studies. Rooted in Caribbean studies, she writes alongside political theory, disability studies, performance studies, and anti colonial traditions in both poetics and political economy.
She is currently writing interdisciplinarily about how deficiency and excess are produced and ascribed onto black cultural productions and spaces as a central part of normative humanness, colonial world craft, state sovereignty/state formation, and resource deprivation—focusing on black dominicanidad...
Joanna Cardenas is a first-generation student from South Central Los Angeles, California. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with honors and received a B.A. in African American Studies and Legal Studies. Her current research interest lies at the nexus of critical carceral studies, urban ethnography, and Black feminist thought, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender. She is particularly interested in how carceral systems impact Black and Latinx women in inner-city neighborhoods through surveillance and other policing practices.
Naomi Alao Etsehiywot received her BA from UChicago in Art History (2017), where she studied representations of blackness, domesticity, and racialized melancholia in postwar and contemporary visual media. She has worked for museums, libraries, and community centers as a researcher, curatorial assistant, and archivist, particularly on projects relating to Black political aesthetics. Currently she researches the social and discursive construction of childhood in relation to blackness, psychoanalysis, and critical theory.
Nitoshia has earned an MLIS with an emphasis in Archives and Cultural Heritage from Dominican University, an M.A. in African American and African Diaspora Studies from the University of California Berkeley, and a B.A. in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Broadly, Nitoshia’s research interests include Black Feminist Theory, African American Women’s History, and Archival theory and practice. Specifically, she is interested in the self-documentation practices of historically marginalized groups through cultural production and community archival...
Roderick E. Jackson is a proud Black Chicagoan, husband, and photographer whose research explores the nexus of race, class, and gender through an interrogation of the value of Black, male labor within a post-industrial context in peri-urban cities. Focusing on Gary, Indiana—the former steel capital of the United States in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008—his work investigates how Black working-class men thrive and build community within hyper-masculine spaces of socioeconomic marginalization. He is also interested in visual ethnographic practices that challenge the narrow...
Sam (all pronouns) is a queer first-generation interdisciplinary Black Feminist literary storyteller and doctoral student in the Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Born in West Palm Beach, FL, Sam earned their BA with honors from Bates College (2023) in Africana Studies, where they explored the intersections between storytelling, disaster, and colonialism in their published thesis, “Colonialism as the Disaster: Retelling the Fight for Haitian Sovereignty.”
Karina Karbo-Wright (she/they) has been invested in Black studies and film/media work for the past eight years through various scholarly, professional, and community-centered capacities. As a Black queer person who grew up in South Minneapolis, Karina’s passion for Black cultural and media studies only flourished in the African American Studies Department at Northwestern University, where she graduated with honors in 2022. Following graduation and her published thesis on the Black Horror Genre, Karina worked as a DEI professional for two years before attending UC Berkeley. They are...
Nejat Kedir earned her BA and MA from University of Washington Bothell. She majored in American Studies as an undergrad and completed her MA on Cultural Studies.
Research interests: Black geography, Black feminism and critical race theory
