PRESIDENT
Jemima Pierre
Dr. Jemima Pierre is President of the Association of Black Anthropologists (a section of the AAA) and Professor of Global Race in the Institute of Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia. She is also a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class at the University of Johannesburg. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist in the African Diaspora Program at the University of Texas, Austin, her research and teaching engages with Africa and the African diaspora across three broad areas of inquiry: 1) the relationship of political economy to race, as articulated through capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism; 2) migration, transnationalism, and diaspora; and 3) the ethics and politics of western knowledge production and disciplinary formation.
Dr. Pierre has published widely; her essays and articles have examined the racial history of the discipline of anthropology, race and colonialism, theories of the African diaspora, the cultural politics of racial formation in Africa, Western resource extraction in Africa, and the history and politics of U.S. imperialism in Haiti and the Caribbean. She is also the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race. The Predicament of Blackness was winner of the 2014 Elliot Skinner Book Award in Africanist Anthropology and long listed for the 2013 OCM – BOCAS Literary Prize. Her next book, titled Of Natives, Ethnics, and True Negroes: A Counter-History of Anthropology, will be published in 2024.
PRESIDENT-ELECT
Todne Thomas
Todne Thomas is a socio-cultural anthropologist and tenured professor. She holds a joint appointment at Yale Divinity School and Yale College. In collaboration with Afro-Caribbean and African American congregants, Thomas conducts ethnographic research on the racial, spatial, and familial dynamics of black Christian communities. Her scholarship and teaching explore intersectional constructions of power and critical forms of consciousness and practice that attend modalities of “the sacred.”
Her forthcoming book From Hate to Hallows: Re-framing Black Church Arson (contracted with Duke University Press) examines the burning of a predominately black Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee in 2015. She argues that black church arson is an interpretive phenomenon that is best apprehended through local explanatory frameworks of religion, race, and hallowed ground.
Her book Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality (Duke University Press, 2021) locates a black evangelical community at the center of their own religious story, presenting their determined spiritual relatedness as a form of insurgency. Thomas argues that kincraft—the means by which church members construct one another as brothers and sisters in Christ—animates community life. Diligently genealogical, the book traces diasporic and religious antecedents of black evangelical kin-making. The ethnography accents congregants’ critical mobilizations of kincraft against normative denominational and nuclear family constructs, and some of the ethno-racial exclusions within US evangelicalism.
Thomas is also the co-editor of New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties across the Abrahamic Religions (2017) with Asiya Malik and Rose Wellman. She has authored peer-reviewed articles for venues, such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Africana Religions, Anthropology and Humanism, and the Journal of African American Studies.
SECRETARY/CO-TREASURER
Bertin M. Louis, Jr.
Bertin M. Louis, Jr. PhD is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American & Africana Studies (AAAS) at the University of Kentucky. He is the winner of the 2023 Sam Dubal Memorial Award for Anti-Colonialism and Racial Justice in Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Louis is also the winner of the 2023-2024 Wenner-Gren Fellowship in Anthropology and Black Experiences (administered by the School for Advanced Research).
Bertin served as President of the Association of Black Anthropologists (a section of the AAA [2021-2023]), is a past Editor of Inside Higher Ed’s Conditionally Accepted column, a former contributor to Higher Ed Jobs, and a co-editor for the Truthout series called “Challenging the Corporate University.” Louis is also the co-author of the forthcoming Conditionally Accepted: Navigating Higher Education from the Margins (University of Texas Press, 2024).
Dr. Louis is also the owner and founder of Navigating Higher Education (NHE), an award-winning academic consulting firm which offers higher education-related services and empowers its clients to find and secure academic positions.
CO-TREASURER
Shanti Parikh
Shanti Parikh is Chair of African and African-American Studies and Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and of African and African-American Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis.
Professor Parikh’s research focuses on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism, and the politics of state and global interventions (such as public health, humanitarian aid, and legal reforms) that emerge to manage, protect, and mold populations. Her primary research has been the history and ethnography of sexuality, gender, and class in Uganda, East Africa with particular interest in how they have been shaped by the HIV epidemic and aggressive efforts to track, measure, and control what has become the most studied modern epidemic. She is currently writing an ethnography on black masculinity along the TransAfrica Highway based on over 20 years of research. She is also involved in an on-going research project on commercial sex and mobility in HIV hotspots in truck stops, fishing communities, and sugar growing regions in Uganda.
PROGRAMMING COMMITTEE
Deneia Y. Fairweather
Deneia Y. Fairweather has a Ph.D in Applied Anthropology from the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL USA with a specialization in Applied Cultural Anthropology. She also holds a M.Ed in Reading Education and is a Certified Professional Educator with the State of Florida.
Dr. Fairweather is currently a Lecturer at John Jay College and has taught at Hillsborough Community College in Florida, USA and Galen University in Belize C.A. She has taught online, face to face and hybrid courses on the post-secondary level since 2018. She also worked as an Instructional Coach, an ESE Specialist and Reading teacher in primary and secondary schools for
over 14 years.
Dr. Fairweather’s research interests are situated within the field of educational anthropology. Here, she focuses on the documentation, exploration and description of educational experiences particularly among male adolescents in the African Diaspora including Belize, Brazil and Florida
USA. These experiences serve as a framework for building educational systems based on what it could look like–from a learner’s perspective.
Currently, Dr. Fairweather is the founder and owner of ESE Consulting, LLC, an educational consultant business that emphasizes diversity and inclusive education, culture building in organizations and educational institutions and the development of innovative educational technologies that promote diversity and social emotional learning. ESE Consulting, LLC offers
high-level coaching services for educators and an applied anthropological-based curriculum called Anthropology in Motion™ for adolescent youth. Results from these workshops can be found on www.aim.center.
Dr. Fairweather currently splits time between Brooklyn, New York and Tampa Florida, USA and can be reached via email at dfairweather@eseconsultinggroup.com or Whatsapp:+18134215004
Jason Vasser-Elong
Jason Vasser-Elong is a professor in the College of Education at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, where he also earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing and studied cultural anthropology and African Diaspora studies. He is the author of Shrimp (2Leaf Press, 2018), a collection of poetry that analyzes identity in a post-colonial context. His peer reviewed essay “Treading the Atlantic” appears in the special edition of the Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies – special issue on “Netherlandic Migrations: Narratives from North America”. A General Anthropology Division travel award recipient for the 2021 American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in Baltimore, MD, where he presented “Treading the Atlantic”. He has published articles in The St. Louis – Post Dispatch and The Saint Louis American newspapers. Jason’s most recent poetry can be found in SAPIENS magazine, where he served as poet-in-residence for 2022.
Rachel Chapman
Rachel Chapman is a Black feminist activist anthropologist who uses alternative and native (alter/native), and performative, racial and social justice approaches. As an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, and adjunct associate professor in Global Health and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, her research, teaching and service focus on global health disparities, suffering and resistance through an intersectional, transformative justice lens, as well as identifying and addressing the effects of systemic racism in health institutions, policies and practices on communities of color. Her expertise encompasses race, racism and reproduction; survivance and liberation practices among African and African Diaspora communities; impact of structurally violent economic austerity policies on health and decolonization movements; and reproductive health trauma. Her core projects include Black women’s reproductive care-seeking; the impact of gender violence on health; HIV treatment during pregnancy; perinatal care-giving in refugee and immigrant communities; teen peace-making and restorative justice in urban communities. Her ethnography, Family Secrets: Risking Reproduction in Central Mozambique (2010), documents a decade of women’s post-civil war pregnancy and birth experiences as the HIV/AIDS epidemic exploded. New work documents Seattle’s East African refugee and immigrant community health needs and tests a community-based model of innovative perinatal care with these families. Her latest grant seeks to improve management of maternal pre-eclampsia, stress and depression and DV/intimate partner violence during COVID-19 quarantine.
Layla D. Brown
Layla D. Brown is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology & Africana Studies and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Brown’s research focuses on Pan-African, Socialist, and Feminist social movements in Venezuela, the US, and the broader African Diaspora. Layla was a 2020-2021 Research & Writing Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study and a 2021-2022 Senior Research Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research.
COMMUNICATIONS COLLECTIVE
VP OF COMMUNICATIONS
Kaniqua Robinson
Kaniqua L. Robinson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Furman University. Her research interests include politics of memory, race and the criminal justice system, Black feminism, racial politics of the U.S. South, and African American deathways. Dr. Robinson is currently working on her book manuscript based on her dissertation research (“The Performance of Memorialization: Politics of Memory and Memory-Making at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys), which investigates the politics involved in the memory-making processes of a state reform school in Marianna, Florida. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Anthropology (cultural) from the University of South Florida in December 2018. Dr. Robinson earned a M.A. in Anthropology and B.A. in English from Georgia State University.
Edward C. Davis IV
Edward C. Davis IV teaches African American Anthropology at Southland College Prep Charter High School in Richton Park, Illinois for dual-credit with Loyola University Chicago. For 8 years, Davis rebooted Africana and Anthropology at Malcolm X College as tenured faculty, Social Sciences Chair, and discipline liaison for City Colleges of Chicago. Davis became Mellon research scholar at the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University in Mississippi before his current post in Illinois. Davis earned an MPhil in Anthropology at University of Cambridge, and MA-PhD degrees in African Diaspora studies at University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation Beer, Blood, and the Bible: Economics, Politics, and Geolinguistic Praxis in Kongo-Ngola linked ancient Nubian pharmacological agronomics with postcolonial TV ads; centuries of uterine dynastic kinship in the Kongo Kingdom and Lunda Empire; and ethnolinguistic cultural restitution via Chokwe algorithmic lusona proverbs to restore global Native sovereignties. This research undoes the 1662 law of partus sequitur ventrem. In 1619, ancestors of his paternal grandmother’s own grandmother’s grandmother arrived in Virginia from Malanje, Angola. Davis takes pride in his Maroon DNA on the Illinois Trail of Tears in Underground Railroad homesteads. After working in Congo-Angola, Davis formed Uloño Geolinguistic Praxis Services, Inc. based on the Umbundu principle of intergenerational knowledge.
TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Aisha Beliso-DeJesus
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is editor of Transforming Anthropology, the flagship journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, and Professor of Anthropology in the Departments of Spanish and Portugese and American Studies at Princeton University. A cultural and social anthropologist, Dr. Beliso-De Jesús has conducted ethnographic research with Santería practitioners in Cuba and the United States since 2003. Her book, Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion(Columbia University Press, 2015) details the transnational experience of Santería, in which racialized and gendered spirits, deities, priests, and religious travelers remake local, national, and political boundaries and actively reconfigure notions of technology and transnationalism. Her current research, “Policing African Diaspora Religions,” draws on ethnographic research with police and religious practitioners in the United States exploring questions of race, religion, and policing.
ARCHIVIST/HISTORIAN
Deborah Frempong