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.
Jasmine “Jas” Flowers graduated from Columbia University in 2023 with a BA in African American and African Diaspora Studies and a BA in Human Rights. Their research interests include science and technology studies, disability studies, affect theory, and Black critical thought. Jas is interested in how psychiatric discourse and institutions mediate the bodymind and facilitate antiblack violence in the 21st century. In their free time, Jas likes to read, write, and spend time outdoors. They are interested in creative nonfiction and experimental writing. Jas is...
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...
Adriana Green is a cross-genre writer from southern Virginia with a love of all things otherworldly. After graduating from William and Mary with her B.A. in English and a minor in Literary and Cultural Studies, Adriana worked in the non-profit and queer performance communities of Richmond, VA.
Most recently, Adriana completed her MFA in Writing at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. While in NYC she taught creative writing courses as well as black history through Afrofuturist literature at Adelphi University. While in New York, she also worked as a writing consultant at...
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...
Cherod Johnson’s research focuses on 19th and 20th century African American literature, film, and photography of the U.S. and the Caribbean; theories of race, pornography and sadomasochism, and the african diaspora; and the intersections of law, personhood, and finance capitalism. The questions that sustain Cherod’s scholarship emerge from an abiding interest in queer theory, psychoanalysis, and feminist studies.
Cherod is interested in queer articulations of blackness in African American literature and visual cultures, and how sociopolitical claims of personhood...
