Alexandra Gessesse is a cultural worker, daughter of the diaspora, and PhD Candidate in the Department of African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Alexandra’s dissertation examines how Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants navigate historically Black neighborhoods in the U.S., forging new forms of belonging through the lenses of place, politics, and popular culture. As a visual storyteller, Alexandra uses photography and video to capture the everyday moments where these complex negotiations of identity unfold—revealing how Blackness is performed, contested, and...
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...
(he/him) is a multi-method, (un)inter-disciplined PhD student in the Department of African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research engages questions of Black visuality, mourning, madness, and the aesthetics of embodiment. He earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College with a double major in English Literature and a specialized major in Black Studies entitled “Visual Cultures and Literature of the African Diaspora” as a Mellon Mays Fellow.
Brandon’s writing considers mourning as both an...
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.
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
Chantel Eboni McCrea (she/they/he) is a scholar of deeply invested in Black diaspora studies and in particular, their intersections with Gender and Sexuality Studies. This investment has led Chantel to be an abolitionist educator, activist, and organizer for over 10 years now from 6th grade until the present. Her initial interest in this was only further nurtured by her time in the Black Studies, Gender and Sexuality, and Performance Studies departments at Northwestern University where she completed various research projects ranging from archival research on...
