Events

Dr. Vanessa E. Thompson is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Queen’s University. Her scholarship and teaching focuses on black studies and anti-colonialism, abolition, critical racism and migration studies, and activist feminist ethnographies.

She has published on blackness and black movements in France and Europe more broadly, and black abolitionist struggles and world-making. Vanessa is a member of the International Independent Commission on the Death of Oury Jalloh and organizes with abolitionist feminist collectives in Europe and globally.

Dr. Kevin Quashie teaches black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the department of English at Brown University (USA). Primarily, he focuses on black feminism, queer studies, and aesthetics, especially poetics. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012) and Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021). Currently, he is thinking about a book of black sentences and black ideas.

Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people (Moreton Bay). She is Professor of Indigenous Research, School of Social Science, University of Queensland and Australia’s first Indigenous Distinguished Professor. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and an hon. Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Moreton-Robinson was the founding Director of the Australian Research Council’s National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network (NIRAKN) and the former President of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Higher Education Consortium (NATSIHEC), which is committed to progressing, elevating, and implementing Indigenous knowledges within universities and increasing the availability of higher education to our communities. She is the founding President of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association (ACRAWSA).
 

Moreton-Robinson’s publications include her first monograph: Talkin Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (UQP) 2000 is a seminal work in the field of Critical Indigenous Studies. Her second monograph The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty (2015) won the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s (NAISA) subsequent book prize in 2016. Her edited collections include Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations, 2016 Arizona Press, Arizona. Transnational Whiteness Matters, 2008 Lexington Books, United Kingdom, Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, 2007 Allen and Unwin, New South Wales; Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism in Australia, 2004 Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Professor Moreton-Robinson serves on several editorial boards and was the first Aboriginal scholar appointed to the prestigious American Studies Association’s flagship journal American Quarterly. She is currently President Elect Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).
 

Prior to her life in the academy, Professor Moreton-Robinson worked in public administration and served as a board member on several Indigenous community organisations. She is currently a board member of the Indigenous rights advocacy organisation:  Foundation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research Action LTD (FAIRA).

Zoé Samudzi holds a PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco and is a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class at the University of Johannesburg. Her research engages German coloniality, the Ovaherero and Nama genocide and its afterlife, and the cultural politics of colonial memory. She is co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press 2018). She is also a writer and art critic whose work has appeared in The Architectural Review, Funambulist Magazine (for which she has also served as guest editor), The New Republic, Art in America, ArtThrob, and other outlets; and she is an associate editor at Parapraxis Magazine and a contributing writer at Jewish Currents.

Susan Blight (Anishinaabe, Couchiching First Nation) is an interdisciplinary artist working with public art, site-specific intervention, photography, film and social practice. Her solo and collaborative work engages questions of personal and cultural identity and its relationship to space. Susan is co-founder of Ogimaa Mikana, an artist collective working to reclaim and rename the roads and landmarks of Anishinaabeg territory with Anishinaabemowin and is a member of the Indigenous Routes artist collective which works to provide free new media training for Indigenous youth.  Susan received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography. a Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies from the University of Manitoba, and a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Windsor in Integrated Media. She is currently a PhD candidate in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (UofT) and her dissertation looks at the visual and spatial formations of Anishinaabeg geographies of resistance.  Susan is Delaney Chair in Indigenous Visual Culture at OCAD University and an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts & Science. 

Gabrielle Goliath situates her practice within the histories, life worlds and present-day conditions of black, brown, femme and queer life, refusing its terminal demarcation within a paradigm of racial-sexual violence. The conditions of hope that underscore the social encounters of her work ask for what she terms a life-work of mourning­ – “for to imagine and seek to realise the world otherwise is to bear with us those lost to or still surviving an order of violence we hope to and must transform”.

Goliath’s immersive installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. Her video and sound work Chorus (2021) recently opened at Dallas Contemporary, Texas, and will travel to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in December. Recent exhibitions include This song is for…, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel; The Normal, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburg; This song is  for…, Konsthall C, Stockholm; Our Red Sky, Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg; and The Power of my Hands, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. She has won a number of awards including a Future Generation Art Prize/Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum. 

Dr. Lewis R. Gordon is an Afro-Jewish public intellectual, academic, and musician (jazz, blues, rock, reggae, hip hop, etc.). He teaches at UCONN, where he is Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department, with affiliations in many academic units, including Caribbean Studies and Jewish Studies. He lectures and is involved in political and artistic projects across the globe and holds appointments in South Africa, Jamaica, India, and France. These include founding programs such as The Second Chance Program and organizations and centers ranging from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies to, most recently, the Philosophy and Global Affairs Group. He is the author of many books for which he has received accolades, which include the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for Outstanding Work on Human Rights in North America. His most recent books are Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021) and Fear of Black Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022; London: Penguin Books,  2022), which was listed on Literary Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2022. He is this year’s recipient of the Eminent Scholar Award from the Global Development Studies division of the International Studies Association.

Dr. Thandi Loewenson (b.1989, Harare) is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilises design, fiction and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne, Thandi engages in projects which provoke questioning of the status-quo, whilst working with communities, policy makers, unions, artists and architects towards acting on those provocations. Thandi is a Tutor at the Royal College of Art, a Visiting Professor at the Aarhus School of Architecture, a co-curator of the platform Race, Space & Architecture and a co-foundress of the architectural collective