planning committee
april l. graham-jackson
i am a proud third generation Black chicagoan, former music journalist, and phd candidate and berkeley Black geographies fellow in the geography department at uc berkeley. my research explores how music and sound as racialized features of everyday life illuminate the ways Black chicagoans internalize emplacement, navigate urban to suburban migration, and confront the geographical redevelopment of urban-regional areas in the post- civil rights era. i examine the racialization of music and sound and how they are mediated, contextualized, and experienced through the everyday rhythms of Black urban and suburban life.
i am the founder of the Black geographies graduate student conference, co-author of the Black geographies library guide with Robert Moeller, and co-chair of the Black geosonicologies research group with Sibahle Ndwayana through the center for race and gender. i am also collaborating with my husband roderick e. jackson on a multimedia project that explores the interplay between the sociosonic, music, and visual textures of Black livingness in chicagoland. robert moeller and i recently published our article, "Black scale: constructing "haunted" overpasses as relational methodologies" in the professional geographer.
i graduated summa cum laude and phi beta kappa with a bachelor's degree in Black geographies from mount holyoke college. i also wrote an award winning 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 how they (re)claimed space|place through the formation of house music, house culture, and what i termed, "house geographies."
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.