np:

Juliann Anesi is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include disability and indigeneity, educational policies, and decolonial feminisms. As a community educator and activist, she has also worked with non-profit organizations and schools in American Sāmoa, California, Hawai ́i, New York, and Sāmoa. Juliann’s work has appeared in venues including Disability and the Global South, Disability Studies Quarterly, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 to 2000; and Disability & Society. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, "Tautua: Disability Activism in Sāmoa."

 

Rodney Bates completed his Ph.D. in Adult and Higher Education at the University of Oklahoma in 2017. Dr. Bates’s research focuses on African American males’ experiences at historically white institutions, as well as on dominant and resistant notions of success in higher education. Dr. Bates’s areas of interest include unpacking the inequality of student experiences, understanding important implications for broadening equity and inclusion for underrepresented populations, and student of color access to higher education. His research and practice speaks to the need to fully include marginalized students in institutional decision-making, curriculum development, and the day-to-day leadership and operations of our institutions. Dr. Bates’s research and professional activities continually focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Furthermore, he intentionally collaborates with students, faculty, and school practitioners on topics related to social justice, diversity, equity, education policy, access to higher education for traditionally underserved populations, and addressing inequities across the P-20 pipeline.

 

Carolina Alonso Bejarano (aka Rataprincess) is a scholar-activist, cartoonist and DJ living in London and Brooklyn, ancestral land of the Lenape. She is a lawyer with a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, and she teaches Law at the University of Warwick. As a researcher and organizer, her interests lie at the intersection of art and the law, particularly in relation to the immigrants’ rights movement in the US and reproductive justice in the Americas. Carolina has produced numerous multimedia events on activism and community organizing the UK and the US, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Feminist Formations, The Believer, WritersMosaic, Revista BLAST and Jadaliyya, among others. Notably, along with her fellow New Jersey immigrants’ rights activists, in 2015 Carolina wrote, produced and performed the play Undocumented/Unafraid about the rights of undocumented immigrants in the US. Her debut book, Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (2019, Duke University Press), was written with her field collaborators, women community organizers in New Jersey, about the liberatory possibilities of ethnographic research. Carolina’s forthcoming projects include Undocu-Artivism, a book portraying the artworks of undocumented activists in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania (edited with Teresa Vivar and Mirian Mijangos García), and If We Survive the Future, a graphic novel about an intercultural couple living in NYC (with creative partner Peter Quach).

 

Melinda Chen (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Chen’s scholarship examines sexual violence, queer of color critique, public policy and health, U.S. welfare reform, and feminist and queer/ing methodologies. Her first book, Killing Radicalism: Neoliberalism, Normativity & the Anti-Rape Movement (under contract with NYU Press), explores the ways in which victim advocates who support survivors of sexual assault negotiate with neoliberal logics at U.S. and tribal rape crisis centers. Dr. Chen teaches in the areas of feminist and and queer/ing methods and methodologies, violence and crime, radical feminisms and social justice activism, and 2SLGBTQIA+ studies. She takes a critical healing pedagogical approach to students, which views learning as a dialectical, ongoing process in which students strengthen their relationships to bodies of thought and communities to participate reflexively in their social worlds. Dr. Chen received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Kansas and her B.A. in Global Liberal Studies, concentrating in Law, Ethics & Religion, from New York University.

 

Dr. Daniel Coleman (he/they) is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Affiliate Faculty Member in Africana Studies. Dr. Coleman is a performance artist, dancer/choreographer, poet, and transdisciplinary artist-scholar who prioritizes both performance mediums and written scholarship. Prior to joining Georgia State, he was an Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dr. Coleman’s art practice and research query how colonial forces, from the onset of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Native/Indigenous genocide, have used colonial and eugenicist racial and gender logics to exclude Black, Native/Indigenous, women, queer, and trans people from its Human project. His publications appear in Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic; Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose; The Black Trans Prayer Book; The Black Scholar; The Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies and Communication; and Geographies of Us: An Ecosomatic/s Reader. Dr. Coleman’s book, Refusals and Reinventions: Engendering New Indigenous and Black Life across the Americas (2024), considers his critical trajectories and participation in intersectional justice struggles in the US and Mexico, situating them within larger abolitionist and decolonial movements for Black civil rights and Native/Indigenous sovereignty. He identifies how Black and Indigenous people create, exist in, and reclaim many worlds—the pluriverse—through their artistic refusals and reinventions.

 

Yalda Hamidi (She/Her/Hers) is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and a Ms. Committee of Scholars member. She completed her academic degrees in Iran and the United States. Yalda passionately identifies as a feminist pedagogue, mentor, and storyteller. In her research, Dr. Hamidi employs an anti-racist and transnational feminist lens to examine Iranian women's activism and literature. She has authored book chapters on #MeToo Iran, as well as peer-reviewed articles on Iranian diasporic literature and feminism. At Minnesota State University Mankato, Yalda teaches courses on Transnational, Postcolonial, Islamic Feminism/s, Cultivating Inclusive Classrooms, and Queer of Color Critique. She actively collaborates with Women's Centers, local non-profit organizations, and the press to amplify the stories of women of color for broader public awareness. 

​

Dr. Kenneth L. Johnson, II is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature at College of Charleston in Charleston, SC. Dr. Johnson’s research interests include 20th and 21st-century African American narratives, Black men’s public letters, the works of Kiese Laymon, Black Southern boyhood, Black men’s memoirs, and Black masculinity studies. He is a proud HBCU graduate of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) and holds graduate degrees in African American Literary and Cultural Studies from Florida State University. He has taught courses on contemporary Black men’s memoirs, Kiese Laymon, Toni Morrison, and “Fire in Little Africa,” an interdisciplinary course about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Currently, he is working on a manuscript tentatively entitled "Knocking the Hustle: Black Men’s Public Letters." This project aims to showcase how Black men utilize letter writing for various reasons such as navigating trauma and grief, moving from a theory of love to a praxis of love, and radically rescripting societal constructions of Black masculinity. "Knocking the Hustle" argues that although Black men’s letter writing has seen an upswing in its visibility within the last decade, other genres of communication have allowed Black men to engage with letters beyond the written word. Based in the close reading of texts, this project pushes the bounds of the epistolary and centers Black men within in a genre and practice that troubles the oft-rigid definitions of Black masculinity and manhood. 

 

Mimi Khúc, PhD, is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the creator of the mental health projects Open in Emergency and the Asian American Tarot, and the author of dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, a deep dive into the depths of Asian American unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university, and an exploration of new approaches to building collective care.

 

Ocqua Gerlyn Murrell (she/they) is a sociologist, Black and Caribbean feminist, curator, and assistant professor in the department of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at the University of Florida. Dr. Murrell holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and a women’s and gender studies certificate from Virginia Tech. She has taught gender relations and the sociology of family, sex, and gender at Virginia Tech and Ferrum College. She teaches interdisciplinary perspectives in women’s studies, girlhood studies, transnational feminisms, and transitional feminisms at the University of Florida. Dr. Murrell’s research interests include sex education curriculums, reproductive justice, social inequality, gender relations, women’s studies, queer studies, sex work, and girlhood studies. Her work aims to give volume and visibility to the stories of Black women, girls, femmes, and LGBTQ+ people in the west and from the global south.

 

Marcy Quiason (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Lawrence University. Dr. Quiason’s research draws on feminist analyses to examine the ways that universities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and non-profit organizations negotiate political and economic systems that constrain and empower their work. Her latest project examines how grassroots organizations use human-centered design principles in the development of their leadership structures, particularly within non-traditionally corporatized spaces such as sex work and Gender Studies programs in the U.S. Dr. Quiason’s previous project examined how Philippine anti-trafficking NGOs build legitimacy through affective narratives and the circulation of emotion. Dr. Quiason's teaching interests are wide-ranging. She teaches courses on intersectional feminist theory, decolonial feminist theory, feminist nonprofit organizations, and feminist methods. In her classroom, Dr. Quiason emphasizes experiential learning to decolonize the classroom and open dialogue with students about the ways that feminisms affect their lived experiences. In 2022, Dr. Quiason was the recipient of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest Mellon Faculty Fellowship, and her scholarship has been published in academic journals such as Women, Gender and Families of Color and Trauma, Violence and Abuse, as well as presented to and with grassroots community workers. She received her Ph.D. in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and her M.A. in Political Science from the University of Kansas. 

 

Mariel Rowland is a third year Ph.D. student of Culture and Theory at the University of

California Irvine. Mariel’s research centers Black feminist teaching across time and space. She studies the lives and pedagogical work of womxn educators who lived and worked in the United States between the 19th and 21st centuries. With attention to the changing legal and social context in which they lived, she traces the continuity of their different methods of rupture. Studying and participating in pedagogy within, against, and beyond American education, she asks how does pedagogy travel through an ongoing network that forms collectively and intergenerationally? With a background in art museum education, Mariel’s own practice as an educator informs her research.

 

Atia Sattar (she/her) is a poet, teacher, and scholar living in Los Angeles. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the Pennsylvania State University and is currently Associate Professor (Teaching) of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. Her interdisciplinary teaching and research engage with the fields of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Critical University Studies, Critical Race Theory, Motherhood Studies, Medical Humanities, Science and Technology Studies, and Mindfulness. Her articles and essays have appeared in Isis, Journal of Medical Humanities, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Academe, Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, and elsewhere. Dr. Sattar’s poetry explores the embodied intersections between grief, gender, race, trauma, and motherhood. Her poems can be found in Rogue Agent (Pushcart nomination), Cathexis Northwest Press, and West Trade Review.

 

Dr. Omi Salas-SantaCruz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education, Culture, & Society at the University of Utah and serves as Co-Chair of both the Association of Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS) and the Queer Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). With a PhD in Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender in Education from UC Berkeley and an MA in Sociology from Columbia University, their research explores the intersections of trans studies, decolonial theory, and Latina/x philosophy, with a focus on the experiences of queer and trans-Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color. A recognized expert in Decolonial Trans* Feminism and Jotería pedagogy, Dr. Salas-SantaCruz's innovative work challenges colonial logics, centering healing and community care in educational spaces. 

 

Mejdulene Bernard Shomali is a queer Palestinian poet and Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). She received a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 2015 and an MA in Women’s Studies from Ohio State University in 2009. Her first book, Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives was published by Duke University Press (Feb 2023). For the 23-34 academic year, she is in residence as a fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. At Cornell she is working on a project called "Palestine Matters: Aesthetics, Embodiment, and Pleasure in Palestine Studies" which explores how Palestinian bodies experience pleasure and organize resistance amidst Palestine’s subjection to occupation, apartheid, and genocide. Her poetry chapbook agriculture of grief: prayers for my father’s dementia is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (August 2024).

  

Laura Terrance is Akwesasne Mohawk from what is now known as Northern New York, Southern Ontario, and Southern Quebec. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and, in 2012, she was awarded a master’s degree in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Indigenous Studies Department at the University at Buffalo. Her areas of research interest include Indigenous studies, gender studies, critical race theory, social theory, knowledge production, Native literature, and Native film. Her manuscript, Rotisken’ra:kéte: Violence and the Anti-Colonial, considers the relationship between violence inflicted on the settler body by people of color and the positive consequences of that violence. More specifically, it explores the potential for decolonization through representations of violence or threats of violence as retributive acts. Her publication, “Resisting Colonial Education: Zitkala-Sa and Native Feminist Archival Refusal,” appears in a 2012 special edition of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. She has also contributed book reviews for the American Indian Culture & Research Journal.