planning committee
april l. graham-jackson
i am a proud third generation Black chicagoan, former music journalist, phd candidate, and berkeley Black geographies fellow at uc berkeley in the geography department. my research explores how music and sound illuminate the ways Black chicagoans internalize emplacement, navigate urban to suburban migration, and confront how racial capitalist and geographic development reshapes a sense of (un)belonging within Black chicagoland. through music, sound, and auditory placemaking, i examine how Black people define and (re)produce geographic Blackness and the everyday rhythms of Black urban and suburban life. i am the founder of the Black geographies graduate student conference, chair of the Black geosonicologies research group with the center for race and gender at uc berkeley, and i recently published Black scale: constructing "haunted" overpasses as relational methodologies" with robert moeller in the professional geographer.
before matriculating at uc berkeley, i graduated summa cum laude and phi beta kappa from mount holyoke college with a bachelor's degree in Black geographies. i am the first person to graduate with this degree. i also wrote an award winning honors thesis entitled: still sweatin'...mapping house and Black bodies: place-making in the Black house music and cultural community of chicago. my thesis explored the placemaking efforts of the Black house community in chicago and the ways they exerted their sociogeographic power and (re)claimed space|place through the formation of house music, house culture, and what i termed, "house geographies." before i pursued my phd, i worked as a music journalist for 16 years. i served as the executive editor of the popular hip hop blog kevingnottingham.com and as a freelance writer for hip hop dx, potholes in my blog, the chicago defender, soul train, and other websites. i have interviewed aretha franklin, common, outkast, chaka khan, bob james, and many other artists.
Matt Alexander Randolph
I am a History PhD candidate at Stanford University in the Transnational, Global, and International (TIG) field focusing on the intellectual, political, and cultural history of the African Diaspora in the Atlantic World. My dissertation explores the history of the United States and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century through the migrations, encounters, and exchanges that connected African American, Haitian, and Dominican intellectuals, diplomats, and everyday people.
At Stanford, I served as a graduate coordinator for the Black Studies Collective and as a graduate fellow for the Program in African & African American Studies. I also founded and led two reading groups: Caribbean Studies and another centering the history and legacy of the Black Panther Party.
Outside of academia, I have engaged in public history projects in the Bay Area and beyond, including volunteer work for the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, and my alma mater, Amherst College.
Morgan P. Vickers
I am a writer, researcher, community historian, ethnographer, and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. My work contemplates Black geographies and ecologies, placemaking, dam and reservoir projects, affect, moral geographies, community memory studies, Southern studies, and questions of belonging. My dissertation research focuses on drowned Black towns of the Lowland South and mythologized notions of "progress" and "modernity" embedded in the socio-spatial practices of the New Deal.
I received my B.A. in American Studies, Communication Studies, and Non-Fiction Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am a Graduate Research Fellow with the National Science Foundation, and I currently serve as the Graduate Student Representative for the Landscape Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. My article, "On Swampification: Black Ecologies, Moral Geographies, and Racialized Swampland Destruction" was recently published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
Dimitri Diagne
I am a doctoral student in the UC Berkeley History Department studying French colonialism in West Africa. My current research focuses on how agricultural improvement initiatives figure into colonial and postcolonial discourses of development. I hold a B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale University and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago.