"spatial matters are Black matters." april l. graham-jackson

Sibahle Ndwayana is a PhD Student in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. His research explores the role of sound—in its production as music and as African Diasporic expressive discourse—and how it (re)shapes the way we understand the geographies of the Black Atlantic. More specifically, he examines the ways Cabo Verde’s drought-ridden interiors and globally connected coasts (re)produce geographical imaginaries of Lusophone countries through the interconnections between music, sound, space, and place. 

He prioritize histories of listening as a methodology and emphasize relational practices of collective listening through the sounding of Black places which may inform how we understand Black life in Cabo Verde. By focusing on the sonic events of Cabo Verde, he thinks with the movements, connections, and circulations of Black sonic geographies that consider how Blackness and Africaniety converge and exist within and across African Diasporic space. 

shah noor hussein (they/them) is a writer, visual artist, and educator  crafting narratives at the nexus of Black feminist thought and Queer  diaspora studies. They are a doctoral student and Cota-Robles Fellow in the Departments of Anthropology and  Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. shah earned their  masters in Anthropology and Social Change with a focus on queer black  feminism, liberatory pedagogy, and media production from California  Institute of Integral Studies (2017). shah’s experimental films have been screened nationally and internationally at the Museum of Sonoma County (2022), Association of American Geographers Conference (2022),  and the Aguas Migrantes Short Film Festival in Mexico (2018).

Jenny Henderson is a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University. Her dissertation project asks how artists, particularly from Black and Native communities, interrogate the intertwined crises of sexual violence and colonial geographic conquest through performance. Her essay, “(W)right of Way: Black Geographies and American Interstates,” is forthcoming in Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance: Acts of Rebellion, Activism, and Solidarity. At Tufts, Jenny assisted a multi-year transformative justice project; she has taught and guest-lectured in the departments of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Jenny received her BA from Miami University.

Calvin Walds is a writer, educator, and sound and image-maker from Detroit, Michigan. His texts have been published in African-American Review, The Yale Review, Hyperallergic, DIAGRAM, (and other publications). His video work has been shared in CTRL-V and Tri-Quarterly. His chapbook- Flee- is out on Split/Lip Press. He is currently a PhD student in Geography at Rutgers-New Brunswick, and holds a MFA from UCSD in Cross-Genre Writing, and a MA in Pan-African Studies. He is currently thinking and writing with electronic music, materiality, assemblage forms, land and decolonization, abolition, and African film. 

Rachael Lin Wheeler is a writer who works at the rupture points of genre  and discipline. A second-year student at Brown University, RL  concentrates in Ethnic Studies and Literary Arts. Their writing can be  found in or is forthcoming in Waxwing, The Journal, Gigantic Sequins, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal,  among others, and their current research interests lie, broadly, in  queer of color critique, excavating liberatory futurities, subversive  epistemologies, and twentieth and twenty-first century cultural  production in what is currently called the U.S. RL seeks to inhabit the  crossroads of political organizing, art-making, and scholarship as a way  to centralize dreaming radically and building communities of care in  liberation projects.

Robert Moeller is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. His research interrogates racial capitalist political economy and racialization in the Sacramento River Basin of Northern California (Nisenan Maidu and Plains Miwok Territory). He engages in multiscalar analysis of how hydrological infrastructure and the commodification and preservation of agricultural production establish settler colonial temporalities of white futurity, undergirded by racialized fear and promise, with special attention to these structures' historical antecedents in the Atlantic plantocracy and their export into U.S. imperial endeavors in the Pacific. He analyzes how migratory and displaced laboring populations demonized by these formations offer alternate societal imaginaries through their material and poetic interventions throughout the landscape of the Sacramento Valley.

Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin is a PhD Candidate of history at Stanford University. Prior to entering Stanford University, she earned both her B.A. and M.A. in American History at San Francisco State University. She went on to become tenured faculty at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) where she taught African-American and United States History. Her current research interests are focused on civil rights and the African American experience in California and the Pacific Northwest. Her dissertation examines the intersection of racial, structural, and environmental inequality and the black communities struggle to maintain dignity and place in San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point.

juleon robinson is an organizer, community educator, and PhD Student in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. His research explores the antagonism(s) between Blackness and private property within regimes of racial capitalism.  His current project interrogates the role of public housing policy in the ongoing fragmentation of Black geographies in California’s East Bay.

Broadly, his research interests include housing geographies, Third World Marxisms, the Black Radical Tradition, communist organizing and organization, speculative urbanisms, and regional political economy. He is an active tenant organizer in the Bay Area’s Tenant and Neighborhood Councils (TANC) and department steward in UAW Local 2865. He hold a B.A. in Anthropology from Amherst College.

Darion A. Wallace, from Inglewood, CA., is a Ph.D. Student at the Stanford Graduate School of Education in Race, Inequality, and Language in Education. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Rhetoric and African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in International Education Policy Analysis from Stanford University. As a Black Education Studies scholar, Darion’s research explores how abolitionist praxes, pedagogies, and epistemologies rooted in the Black radical and intellectual tradition shape histories of Black education in the American West. Darion is a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Knight-Hennessy Scholars Fellowship, and Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.

Katherine Taylor-Hasty is a PhD Candidate at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. She attended Williams College for her undergraduate degree and graduated with a B.A. in anthropology. She attained her M.S. in Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, where she wrote her thesis on the reinterpretation of Confederate monuments. Her research interests include preservation, monuments, monuments to difficult histories, and the intersections between history, politics, architecture, and preservation. 

Adam Lubitz is a graduate student in the PhD program at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. Before joining the program, he gained MS degrees in urban planning and historic preservation from Columbia University, and a BA in urban studies from New College of Florida. His master's thesis involved applied field research with experimental mapping techniques in the old town of a municipality in Palestine. He has taught GIS coursework at Barnard College and applies his technical backgrounds in planning and conservation towards anti-racist pedagogy.

Alexander Ferrer is a PhD student in the department of Geography at UCLA. He is also a researcher at Strategic Actions for A Just Economy, a South Central Los Angeles based tenant organizing and advocacy group, as well  as the Debt Collective, and is a member of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Previously trained as an urban planner, his research approach spans strategic corporate research and sectoral analysis, critical cartography and GIS, and urban data science. His work focuses on the geographically relational constitution of race, place, wealth, and poverty through the housing system, particularly in the Los Angeles  region. His current project develops a method for quantifying and visualizing the flow of housing values across space, illustrating the constitution of  spaces of white affluence through emmiserating processes of racialized  extraction, engaging critiques of racial capitalism, marxist urban geography, theories of neighborhood formation, and critical whiteness studies. Alex otherwise works on the history of landownership and land struggle in Southern California broadly, the nature of tenancy, and the evolution of tenant organizing practice.

Vera Grace Menafee (they/them) is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, and aspiring educator, from Dayton, Ohio, searching for liberation through the arts, research, and radical solidarity. They are in their third-year at Oberlin College majoring in Africana Studies with a concentration in Education Studies. They have traveled to Namibia, South Africa, Senegal and The Gambia to study farming practices, land-based resistance, and postcolonial reparations on the continent of Africa. Vera is inspired to use their voice to address racial inequalities and systemic forms of oppression, in order to reclaim sovereignty and connection with land for Black and Indigenous communities globally. 

Diego Melo is a political ecologist working on the bloody nexus between dispossession and environmental justice in northwestern Colombia. They investigate the re-configuration of gold mining along the Atrato River (Chocó), where Black Communities and Indigenous Peoples struggle against the capture of their time, the poisoning of their bodies, and the affective legacies of a genocidal regime of counter-insurgent pacification. Their central question asks how value is produced through the exploitation of racialized bodies and territories, collective land titling, and their articulation as sites of extractivism. They are drawn to Black Geographies to frame alluvial gold mining as a carceral regime.

Simone Delaney is a Black Loyalist from Peace and Friendship Treaty Lands currently based in Oakland. Interested in intersections of race/space/ecology, they are an architectural and landscape designer that has supported resilience efforts in San Francisco, New York, Louisiana, Florida, and Jakarta. A strong advocate for spatial justice,  they have been an active organizer with Design as Protest since 2020. They have published works on design justice and Black ecologies for .galt, March International, and Chutney Magazine. Outside  of design, they are committed to centering ancestral land-based practices through Black rootwork.

Olani Ewunnet is an Ethiopian-American urbanist, designer, and artist.  Working at the threshold between design, the arts, and  environment-making practices, her practice threads urban ecological  thinking with speculative and indigenous African epistemologies of  listening and making. She is curator and research lead of art and  architectural projects in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Germany,  and the United States - through community-oriented research, oscillating  across disciplines and geographies. She holds a Masters in Design with a  concentration in Urbanism, Landscape and Ecology from Harvard  University and a BA in Urban and Environmental Policy from Occidental  College.

Gregoria (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She holds a B.A. in History & Theater Arts from UC Santa Cruz (2013), an M.A. in History from the University of Chicago (2017), and an M.A. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley (2020). She is broadly interested in 20th-century Latinx & Caribbean histories, race, sexuality, and empire, aesthetic archives, and queer geographies. Her dissertation attends to Panamanian & Caribbean aesthetics and geographies under occupation and dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s.

Matt Alexander Randolph is 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. His 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, he served as a graduate coordinator for the Black Studies Collective and as a graduate fellow for the Program in African & African American Studies. He also founded and led two reading groups: Caribbean Studies and another centering the history and legacy of the Black Panther Party.

Outside of academia, Matt has 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 his alma mater, Amherst College. 

Akilah Favorss is a PhD Student in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her doctoral work employs a Black feminist framework to articulate the politics of race, class, and gender as Black activists fight to gatekeep the Black Mecca of the South-Atlanta, Georgia. As an ATLien, she centers Black organizers who intertwine oral histories, economic resources, cultural currency, and political mobilization to combat neighborhood whitening in Southwest Atlanta. She explores resistance to structural racism through mapping out the socio-historical development of Black agency during urban reform and the resulting geographical shifts in racial demographics. Amid gentrification she investigate strategies of collective placemaking that seeks to transcend the drastic class disparities in Atlanta’s Black population, reconcile intra-racial class conflict and fortify inter-class solidarity against white space-claiming, capitalists, and residential newcomers. When she is not researching, she is a fitness fanatic who loves cooking healthy soul food, attending Black festivals and spending time with family, especially her twin sister.

Ivana I. Onubogu is a PhD Student in English Literatures at Rutgers University. Their current research interests focus on black diasporic literature, eco-critique, Black geographies, and affect theory. They are currently working on a research project that positions the anxieties of emotional contagion in early modern literature as mirroring the period’s anxieties around the possibility of Western ontoepistemological permeability.

Jah Elyse Sayers (they/them) is a doctoral candidate in Environmental Psychology / Earth & Environmental Sciences, artist-researcher with the Trophallaxis Study Group,  participatory action researcher with the campaign to landmark queer People's Beach at Jacob Riis Park in Neponsit, Queens, and member-worker with Housing Reparations Philly. Their dissertation project grounds in Black queer and trans placemaking and sense of place at Jacob Riis Park and beachgoers' navigation of public-space planning structures and mechanisms. You can find their writing in Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies, BRICLab Essays, Deem Journal, and Society & Space Magazine. 

Khrysta A. Evans is a Doctoral Candidate in Educational Policy Studies in the Social Sciences concentration at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Originally from the Bronx, NY., she earned her BA in Sociology from the University of Maryland, and her MA in Educational Studies from the University of Michigan. Before starting her PhD, Khrysta spent several years working in student support roles in non-profit organizations. Khrysta’s research agenda is at the nexus of race, ethnicity, gender,  education, and place, offering new epistemological, theoretical, and methodological lenses to examine Black girls’ school experiences.

Megan Femi-Cole is a PhD Candidate in the department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. Her areas of interest include Black/ African Diaspora Studies, Black Geographies and Black Feminist Thought. With contributions from these fields, her dissertation explores how memories of migration shape practices of black diasporic place-making for members of Krio heritage community organizations living in what is currently Canada. Femi- Cole hopes to attend to what these practices of placemaking reveal about the politics of Blackness, race, and relation for post -1960’s (West) African diasporas, living in North American settler states.