PARTICIPANTS 2018

Zahra Khalid

Graduate Student, University of California, Berkeley

I study the cultural effects of the War on Terror; specifically, the affect of insecurity in its geographies. By affect, I mean the structures of emotion experienced around a fear of injury. I am interested in how such affect (re)produces—or transforms—social and spatial formations. I wish to engage decolonial thought, critical race, and feminist theory in my work.

Valeria Espitia

PhD student in Art History at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

I am a PhD student in Art History at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City. I have a background in literature and art history, and my research interests comprehend race, modernity, cultural renaissances and postcolonial studies. I obtained my MA in Art History from Southern Methodist University with a Fulbright; my research project discussed figurations of race and modernity in Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias’ drawings of the Harlem Renaissance. My current doctoral research project is about American art critic Selden Rodman and his narrative of the so-called Haitian Renaissance of the 1940s.

Tommaso Petrucci

PhD candidate, University of Bologna

My academic work has always been grounded in a strong critical approach to the mechanisms of functioning of the contemporary globalization and more precisely, the devices of capture of global capitalism. My BA thesis at the University of Bologna (School of Political Sciences) focused on the colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar, whose theories supply important advances to the postcolonial studies. Along with his work, I tried to deconstruct the discourse of development as installed by the international institutions in order to unveil its ideological use to canalize capitals from western countries to the so called "South of the world"; further more, through the case of afro-colombian communities in Tumaco, Colombia, I explored how the hegemonic capitalist mode of production can be subverted and re-used to create perspectives for a non-capitalist mode of production and a post-development discourse. For my MA thesis at University of Bologna (School of Political Sciences), which I am now finalizing, I have decided to shift my focus on critical urban studies and queer theories: thrugh a recollection of cases of european capital cities sponsoring themselves as "gay-friendly" touristic spaces, I analyze how the extraction of LGBT capitalist value in the processes of urban gentrification is necessary to the construction of a homonationalist and islamophobic regime. The self-positioning as a queer subjectivity is the core of the entire work and is the point of departure of my PhD project, which focuses on the role of HIV-positivity as a means of control of the gay male body.

Teresa Colliva

PhD program in Global Histories, Cultures, and Politics at the University of Bologna

I am currently enrolled in the first year of the PhD program in Global Histories, Cultures, and Politics at the University of Bologna. I am working on the representations of Africa and Africans in Italy between the collapse of the Italian colonial empire and the 1970s. My research interest are: cultural and media studies, film studies, race theory, postcolonial studies.

Shanni Zhao

PhD student in Anthropology at Harvard University

Shanni Zhao is currently a third-year Ph.D. student in Anthropology at Harvard University. She also got her MA in East Asian Studies from Duke University and BA in Philosophy from China. Before starting her Ph.D., she spent one year in a feminist NGO in Beijing as an intern and researcher. Her research interests include affect theory, state formation, gender and sexuality studies.

Sarah Balakrishnan

Doctoral candidate in African History at Harvard University

Sarah Balakrishnan is a doctoral candidate in African History at Harvard University. Her dissertation traces the development of a “colonial public” in Southern Ghana from 1870-1940. Her project is concerned with the emergence of the colonial “masses,” and the ways in which changes to land tenure, property development, or the spatial position of social bodies (ie. the ancestors) inculcated new visions of political community.

Saniya Taher

PhD student in the UC Berkeley Department of Comparative Literature

Saniya Taher is a Ph.D student in the UC Berkeley Department of Comparative Literature with a concentration in Critical Theory. Her current research focuses on contemporary Anglophone, Arabophone, and Francophone texts and media from the mid-20th century to the present, grappling with the relation between coloniality and extractivism, and the forms-of-life and spaces arising in excess of their carceral imperatives. And she examines the tension and overlap in the articulations of humanism and post-humanism as engendered under state monopolization of violence and state disinvestment under neoliberal governance.

Rebecca Uliasz

PhD student in the department of Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University

Rebecca Uliasz is currently a PhD student in the department of Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University. Her research interests are located at the intersections of live electronic performance, cybernetics, network culture, the ecological implications of technological architecture, and the digital commons. She uses a hybrid approach to examine subjectivities within digital architectures and their points of contact with materiality; this culminates into a mode of working with and through experimental computer science, media theory, philosophy, and art practice.

Rachel Greenspan

PhD in Literature and a Certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University

Rachel Greenspan received her PhD in Literature and a Certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University. Her dissertation, Dreaming Woman: Argentine Modernity and the Psychoanalytic Diaspora, investigates the transnational circulation of psychoanalytic theory and practice as it comes to inform shifting conceptions of sexual difference in Latin America. Her research interests include global modernisms, transnational gender and sexuality studies, critical theory, film and visual culture, intellectual history, and psychoanalysis. She is Managing Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies and an Associate at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center. Her writing has appeared in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, The Comparatist, and Polygraph.

Pratistha Bhattarai

PhD student in the Literature program at Duke University

Pratistha Bhattarai, originally from Kathmandu, Nepal, is a first-year PhD student in the Literature program at Duke University. Her research lies at the intersection of black studies, postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies. She is interested in looking at how the speculative value form of finance capitalism has historically worked to reify the difference between persons and things – producing, to use Frantz Fanon’s term, a “species” division between valuable humans and disposable nonhumans. A related question that concerns her is of how we can critically engage the nonhuman without redeeming it as a site of positive value. In this vein, she is interested in examining the aesthetic strategies, especially those pertaining to form, employed by thinkers of the Black Atlantic that allude to a form of personhood predicated not on intrinsic value and life but rather on abjection and proximity to death, to things.

Prasad Pannian

Teacher in Department of Comparative Literature, Central University of Kerala, India

Prasad Pannian teaches in Department of Comparative Literature, Central University of Kerala, India. He is the author of Edward Said and the Question of Subjectivity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He has also edited a special issue on The Anthropocene and the Human Sciences (Humanities Circle, The International Journal of Central University of Kerala, Volume 03 | Issue 02 | Winter 2015).

Michael Murphy

PhD in Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, London

I completed my Doctoral research in Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, London. My thesis, Critical Cosmopolitanism: Revitalising Critical Theory through the perspective of self, other and the world, sets a synthesis of the work of Gerard Delanty, Walter Mignolo and Watsuji Tetsurō. The result of this exchange of ideas between East and West, North and South, offers a conceptually non-Eurocentric and multi-disciplinary perspective of time (overcoming the imposition of idealised notions of modernity and accompanying concepts), space (social space), agency (relational), and knowledge (plural). I have reached a provisional agreement for the publication of my research with the series editor of Columbia University Press series, New Directions in Critical Theory. My work has been published in the European Journal of Social Theory, and I have contributed essays on Watsuji Tetsurō and non-Western forms of Cosmopolitan thought, to the Global Social Theory Project developed by Professor Gurminder Bhambra. The research has also been applied to the curation of an art exhibition.

Maurilio Pirone

PhD in Politics, Institutions and History at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of University of Bologna

Maurilio Pirone recently completed his PhD in Politics, Institutions and History at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of University of Bologna. Previously, he completed his MA in Philosophy under the supervision of Prof. Paolo Virno. His work engages with social and labor movements, race and ethnicity, new forms of unionism, platform capitalism and urban regeneration. Currently, he is a freelance researcher working on several international projects. He is also editor and research member of Into the Black Box – A Collective Research on Logistics, Spaces, Labour. He is author of the articles Logistics Struggles in the Po Valley Region: Territorial Transformations and Processes of Antagonistic Subjectivation (with Niccolò Cuppini and Mattia Frapporti, 2015), Historical-Political Narratives: The Dissemination of Race, Nation, Class in Italy (2018) and other forthcoming papers.

Mitchell Damian Murtagh

PhD Candidate at Duke University in the Program in Literature and a Feminist Studies

Mitchell Damian Murtagh is a PhD Candidate at Duke University in the Program in Literature and a Feminist Studies certificate student. Their research interests include feminist new materialism, the philosophy of sexual difference, ontologies of becoming, complicating the relationship between materialism and idealism, and non-hierarchical renderings of process and emergence. Critiquing the effect of hylomorphism in the history of Western metaphysics, M.D. rethinks the relationship between form and matter using examples from quantum and nuclear physics. Their dissertation, “Matter’s Constitutive Matrix: A Feminist Cosmology of Primary Form, Incorporeality, and Nucleogenesis,” offers a feminist analysis of theconstitution of the primordial elements through the event of the Big Bang as a primary example of matter’s capacity for self-formation and organization. They received a B.A. in Philosophy from Rutgers University- New Brunswick in 2012.

Martha Espinosa

PhD student in the Department of History at Duke University

Martha Espinosa is a PhD student in the Department of History at Duke University. She completed her B.A. in Journalism at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), and her M.A. in Gender Studies at El Colegio de Mexico (Colmex). She is currently working on the history of coercive contraception and population control policies in 20th century Mexico.

Maisa Bascuas

PhD candidate in Social Science, University of Buenos Aires

Maisa Bascuas has a degree in Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and she is a PHd candidate in Social Science from the same university. She is a member of the Study Group of Feminisms in Latina America (GEFAL) within the Institute of Latin American and the Caribbean (IEALC-UBA). As a social and political activist, she is part of the Confederation of Labor of the Popular Economy (CTEP) as well as part of the Commision of Research about the Violence in the Territories (CVT). She is also an activis within the popular feminism in Argentina. These days her field of interest is placed at the intersection between the popular economy labor union, the crisis of social reproduction as well as the estrategies of resistence that woman and diversities build in this precarious scenarios of life and territories violence.

Magally A. Miranda Alcázar

Ph.D. student in Chicana/o Studies at UCLA

Magally A. Miranda Alcázar is a first year M.A./Ph.D. student in Chicana/o Studies at UCLA where she is also pursuing a certificate in Experimental Critical Theory. Her research interests include Marxist feminist critical theory and Chicana feminist and borderlands epistemology. Her thesis focuses on the exclusion of domestic workers from modern labor relations and the gendered and racialized stigma attached to domestic work. Situated in the emerging literature on economic justice and low-wage immigrant workers, she will be conducting research this summer on domestic work in Los Angeles with support from the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) and the UCLA Labor Center. Magally sits on the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine where she published her notes on an ethnographic inquiry of domestic workers in the California Bay Area titled “The Power of Trabajadoras and the Subversion of Capital.”

Maegan Ashley Miller

Doctoral candidate of Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Mae Miller is a doctoral candidate of Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research is inspired and informed by the Black radical tradition and Black Atlantic histories, Third World feminisms, and abolition geographies. Mae’s dissertation combines oral history, archival research, and literary analysis in order to examine the role of maritime workers in the formation of Black internationalist political consciousness and communities of resistance in the early twentieth century. Her work focuses on social movements routed through London, New York City, and the British West Indies.

Linsey Ly

Doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Linsey Ly is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation work on absence, immateriality and temporalities of the future in Chinese modern ghost cities operates at the intersection of philosophy, social science and art. Her research interests more broadly include global histories of modernity, continental philosophy and social theory.

Kristina Leganger Iversen

Teaching and research fellow at the University of Oslo

Kristina Leganger Iversen is a teaching and research fellow at the University of Oslo. I March 2018 she defended her Ph.D. dissertation on whiteness, coloniality, and subjectivity in contemporary Scandinavian poetry. Working at the intersection of literary studies, critical theory and critical race and whiteness studies, she is currently developing a postdoctoral project, where she will study how contemporary Scandinavian poetry is partaking in a renegotiation of the conception of the human.

Kristen J. Maye

BA in Afro-American Studies and History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Kristen J. Maye graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.A. in Afro-American Studies and History. Her research focuses on political theory with a particular interest in New World slavery, discourses of freedom, and contemporary neoliberalism. She is interested in raising questions about the position of anti-Blackness in civil society and investigating the technologies of power that seek to produce blackness as nonhuman, thus impacting the possibilities for conceiving and enacting black freedom. Kristen spent the time between her undergraduate studies and graduate studies working in criminal justice and drug policy reform in New York.

Kelvin Parnell

PhD student, University of Virginia

I am a second year Ph.D. student specializing in 19th and early 20th-century American art focusing on the intersections of critical race theory and national identity. Additionally, I am interested art historical theory and methodology, specifically aesthetics. My dissertation topic is on 19th century American bronze sculpture and crafting racial and national identity. I look at artists like Henry Kirke Brown, Thomas Ball, Quincy Adams Ward and Meta Warrick Fuller and the ways in which they depict American nationalism and racial representations through body aesthetics. Moreover, my dissertation will examine what type of semiotic visual language these artists communicate through representations of the body.

Juliana Mia Pistorius

Reader in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford

Juliana M. Pistorius (Mia) is currently reading for a DPhil in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Her work interrogates the racialised politics of Western art music practice in the postcolony, with a focus on opera in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. As an editor of SAMUS: South African Music Studies, she is also interested in the politics of language, and the tension between institutional structures and the decolonial project.

Joseph Wei

PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia

Joseph Wei is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on Asian American poetry.

Jishnu Guha-Majumdar

PhD Candidate, Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University

Jishnu Guha-Majumdar is a PhD candidate in Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University. He has a B.A. in History from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include colonialism, animal studies, American racial politics, and new materialisms. His dissertation argues that a shared political logic connects the massive proliferation of extractive systems of human and nonhuman captivity in the United States, and uses the shared condition of captivity to rethink the relationship between marginalized humans and non-human animals.

Jess Hasper

PhD Student in Political Theory at the University of Virginia

Jess Hasper is a Ph.D. Student in Political Theory at the University of Virginia. She is associated with the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality at UVA, and will complete a certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She reads Foucault and Arendt, is interested in political creativity, and studies the intersections of religious and political thought. Jess received a B.A. with Highest Honors from the University of Michigan in 2016.

Jeremy Sorgen

Doctoral student of religious studies at the University of Virginia

Jeremy Sorgen is a fourth-year doctoral student of religious studies at the University of Virginia. His research uses phenomenology, pragmatism, and social theory to rethink moral anthropologies operative in philosophical and religious ethics. His dissertation conceives the field of environmental ethics as a community of scholar-practitioners developing philosophical competencies in face of impending environmental crisis. He proposes and develops a moral anthropology to sustain strategic efforts to make environmental ethics more adequate to the contemporary problems it seeks to address.

Jamil Sbitan

PhD in history at Columbia University

Jamil Sbitan graduated with his bachelor’s degree in sociocultural anthropology from Boston University in 2014 and his master’s in Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University in 2018. He will be starting his PhD as a Richard Hofstadter fellow in history at Columbia University in the fall. Jamil’s research interests span Arab intellectual history, questions of biopolitics and governmentality, critical theory, and genealogies of modern political concepts.

Inés Molina

Pre-doctoral researcher, Department of History and Theory of Art, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Inés Molina is currently developing a deep research on the graphic documentation of the opaque and silenced Spanish May 68 –happened during the last decade of Franco’s military dictatorship– which is supported by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and she is also finishing a Master of History of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía. Her performance in the historical research is focused on the visual dimension of struggles and the potential of the images as a stimulus for political imagination. At the same time, she has been involved in several fronts of the feminist struggle, having militated in different self-organized spaces both in Mexico City and in Madrid.

Guillermo Antonio Navarro Alvarado

PhD in Ethnic and African Studies at the Federal University of Bahia

Guillermo Antonio Navarro Alvarado received his Ph.D. in Ethnic and African Studies at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil, with the research entitled “Should Africa Unite? The formation of the Theoretical of Unity and the Imagination of Africa within the epistemic Pan-Negrist and Pan-African framework (18th-20th centuries)” (April, 2018), and also obtained a B.A in Sociology from the University of Costa Rica (UCR) (2013). He is a Researcher Associate at Institute of African Studies (IEAf) at Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Brazil. His Research analyze the epistemological and theoretical frameworks of Négritude and Pan-Africanism. Also has publications on the ideological forms of representation of the African tropics and the dynamics of cultural cannibalization in the Caribbean of Costa Rica.

Fatima Hussain

Assistant Professor at the Department of Fine Arts at National College of Arts, Pakistan

Fatima is currently teaching as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Fine Arts at National College of Arts, Pakistan. She also practices as an independent curator and co founder of artist collectives such as Other Asias and Laajverd. Her work is concerned with her critical inquiry into geographies appropriated by hegemonic conceptualizations of space that impact the way creative practice is represented in postcolonial contexts. Fatima is interested in transdisciplinary methodologies in thinking across fields and geographical boundaries in order to understand and mobilize a network of creative practitioners belonging to South Asia.

Eric Otieno

PhD candidate at the Department of Development & Postcolonial Studies, University of Kassel, Germany

Eric Otieno is a PhD candidate at the Department of Development & Postcolonial Studies, University of Kassel, Germany. He is interested in the intersections of civil participation, social justice, politics, the economy and art. His background is in Global Political Economy, Sociology and Political Science. His current research revisits the TRIPS Agreement from a postcolonial perspective, and tests the prospect of transforming its influence on public health and Human Rights via civil protest. Eric is a senior fellow of the Africa Good Governance Network, a 2016 John Lewis fellow and an Art/Culture Editor at GRIOT mag.

Costanza Travaglia

MA in Anthropology and South Asian studies, University of Bologna

Costanza is a newly-graduated Master student of Anthropology and South Asian studies. During her Bachelor at Bologna University, she studied classical Indology and Sanskrit, and had the chance to focus on the history of Yoga and Ayurveda during her Erasmus at Copenhagen University. Since 2015, she has been studying at Heidelberg University enrolled in the master "Health and Society in South Asia". Her thesis was dedicated to the analysis of classical and contemporary Yoga seen from the perspective of Medical Anthropology and modern South Asian Studies.

Benjamín Romero Salado

PhD candidate in Spanish, University of Virginia

Benjamín Romero Salado received his B.A. degree in English Philology at Universidad de Sevilla. As an undergraduate he also studied Applied Linguistics in Antwerp (Belgium) for a year. He later graduated from Universidad de Sevilla with a M.A. in Teaching of Secondary School Education, Vocational Training and Language Teaching. Before his current position as a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish at the University of Virginia, he received a M.A. in Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Delaware. His research interests focus on the intersection between literary manifestations and the visual arts in Contemporary Spain.

Aurélia Mouzet

Junior faculty at the University of Arizona-Tucson

Aurélia received her Ph.D. in Francophone Studies from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is currently working as a junior faculty at the University of Arizona-Tucson and teaches courses in Francophone Literatures, Cultures, and Civilizations. Her research focuses upon the intertwining of myths, religion(s) and politics in literature, theatre and cinema of the black Atlantic. She is currently expanding her dissertation into a monograph that investigates female figurations of Christ in twentieth and twenty-first century black Atlantic literature, theatre and cinema. She also runs a program in interactive theatre (Talk-it-OUT!) that invites students and the community to explore and discuss discrimination and diversity issues in contemporary U.S.A.

Ashley J. Bohrer

Postdoctoral Fellow of Public Philosophy at Hamilton College

Ashley Bohrer is the Truax Postdoctoral Fellow of Public Philosophy at Hamilton College, where she works on making philosophy transcend disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Her research focuses on the intersections of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and hetero/sexism in both the early modern period and in the contemporary world. She is the author of Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Capitalism, which will be published with Transcript Verlag, Columbia University Press and Pluto Press later this year. In addition to her academic work, Bohrer is a committed activist who has organized with a variety of feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist grassroots collectives.

Antonia Anna Ferrante

Phd in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, Università “L’Orientale” Naples

Antonia Anna Ferrante is scholar and activist in transfemminist and queer spaces. She was awarded a Phd in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at Università “L’Orientale” in Napoli for a thesis entitled “Queer Skin Straight Masks: The Homonormative Regime of Visibility Beyond Television”. Currently she is in the scientific committee of the Center for Gender and Postcolonial Studies collaborating with the Technocultures Research Unit. She is interested in feminist and postcolonial critique on neo-television. Now she is focusing on the technological implications of platform tv such as Netflix, transfeminist bio-hacking and feminist science fiction.

Anouk Madörin

Doctoral Fellow at the Research Training Group ‘Minor Cosmopolitanisms’ (University of Potsdam)

Anouk is a 2nd year PhD candidate at the Research Training Group ‘Minor Cosmopolitanisms’ (University of Potsdam). Her thesis deals with images produced within the European border regime and interrogates how these images become part of a visuality which aims to influence, shape and legitimize current migratory and refugee policies as well as produce the affective environment in which the ‘refugee crisis’ takes place. In aligning media images as well as techno-images of surveillance apparatuses, the thesis analyzes the complex ways how visuality is negotiated in post-democratic border regimes.

Alioscia Castronovo

PhD student in Urban Studies, University La Sapienza Rome

Alioscia Castronovo is anthropologist, gratuated at Sapienza University of Rome, actually phd student in Urban Studies at DICEA, La Sapienza, with double supervision at Social Anthropology at IDAES UNSAM in Buenos Aires, where he is developing his ethnographic fieldwork on popular economies, focusing on processes of subjectivation, reconfiguration of urban space and production of the common in the experiences of a selfmanaged cooperative and a recuperated factory in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. He is member of the CLACSO working group "Popular economies: theorethical and practical mapping", of the "International Workers' Economy Network" and the Colabor Platform, a collaborative research project focused on self education and social-innovation in self-managed cooperatives and recuperated factories.

Alessandra Spano

PhD candidate in Political Philosophy, University of Catania

Alessandra Spano is currently enrolled in the first year of the PhD program in Political Sciences at the University of Catania. Her research project is on Marxist feminism in the United States as critical theory of capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries, investigating how it has been capable of challenging and reshaping Marxism and the history of political thought. Her interests also include contemporary political thought, critical theory, Black and Marxist feminism, Marxism and Trotskyism in the US.

Alejandra Santillana Ortiz

Candidate to PhD in Latin American Studies at National Autonomous Mexican University

Alejandra Santillana Ortiz is an ecuadorian left-wing feminist. She studied sociology and political sciences and she is a candidate to PhD Latin American Studies Programm at National Autonomous Mexican University. She is also a researcher of Ecuadorian Studies Institute and Rural Change Observatory.

Adriano Peirone

BA in Political Science Universidad Nacional de Rosario Rosario (Argentina)

My name is Adriano Peirone and I am finishing my degree in Political Science. For the past eight years I have been running Facultad Libre of Rosario, an experimental academy that seeks a new crossroads between social sciences, popular knowledge and activism. Currently I am also coordinator of a Diploma en Formación Sindical, a space for political studies for workers. My research for the thesis is focused on popular demands, populism and social imaginaries around property. My interests include critical theory, the sociology of the subaltern and social inequalities.

Abdul Aijaz

Doctoral candidate in Geography and English at Indiana University, Bloomington

I am a doctoral candidate in Geography and English at Indiana University, Bloomington. My research explores different ideas of water and rivers in the Indus Basin. Using postcolonial ecocritical and new materialist theories, I try to understand the simultaneous instantiation of the Indus rivers as gods and machines in colonial and postcolonial India and Pakistan. This research also asks the crucial questions about knowledge production and power relations on local and global scales. By using fiction, folklore, and scientific texts together, this project destabilizes the fact-fiction and word-world binaries to make the deity in the machine visible.

Lucia Cavallero

Doctoral fellowship in Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires (U.B.A.)

Lucia Cavallero, age 31, sociologist graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Since 2015 I have a doctoral fellowship to investigate financial crimes, its treatment by the justice system and the relation between the penalization of those crimes and the dynamics of financial capitalism. Also, I am member of “Ni una menos”, a political collective that is worldwide known for the massive demonstrations it has organized to denounce violence against women.

Felicia Bishop Denaud

Africana Studies doctoral program Brown University

Felicia Bishop Denaud earned her B.A. cum laude from Columbia University, where she pursued Sociology and African American Studies as a John Kluge Scholar. Her current research at Brown University in the Africana Studies doctoral program engages modernity, empire, and epistemology to explore the relationship between knowledge production and political action within the Black radical tradition, with particular interest in revolutionary Haiti. Her research attends to the religious and cultural dimensions of black political knowledge to both capture the social dynamics of political change and interrogate disciplinary formations. Felicia draws extensively from black intellectual and literary history, black feminism, political theory, philosophy, and historiography.