Speakers

Mohan Dutta

Dean's Chair Professor of Communication and Director of CARE
Massey University

Based on his work on healthcare among indigenous communities, sex workers, migrant workers, farmers, and communities living in extreme poverty, Prof. Dutta has developed an approach called the culture-centered approach that outlines culturally-based participatory strategies of radical democracy for addressing unequal health policies. Based on academic-activist collaborations, the culture-centered approach uses fieldwork, resistive strategies for performance and dialogue-based reflexive participation to create entry points for listening to the voices of communities at the global margins. At the core of his research agenda is the activist emphasis on provincializing Eurocentric knowledge structures, and de-centering hegemonic knowledge constructions through subaltern participation. He has received over $4 million in funding to work on culture-centered projects of health communication, social change, and health advocacy. Recently, he completed a $1.5 million grant funded by the Agency for HealthCare Research & Quality (AHRQ) to develop a culturally-centered health communication project on heart disease among African American communities in the Lake and Marion counties of Indiana. This community-grounded project interrogating the unhealthy structures that constrain the health and wellbeing of African American neighborhoods in the US became the basis for multiple organic projects rooted in the aspirations in the community for health and wellbeing. At NUS, he received over $2 million in funding to run culture-centered projects of health across Asia, including projects on food insecurity in West Bengal, poverty and health in Singapore, health among migrant workers in low skilled sectors, health of transgender sexworkers, health among Malays, and cardiovascular health and marginalization. At Massey, he looks forward to building the work of CARE in the areas of indigenous health, health and migration, and poverty.

Lisa King

Associate Professor of English
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Lisa King’s research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary, and include cultural rhetorics with an emphasis in contemporary Native American and Indigenous rhetorics, visual rhetorics, and material rhetorics. More specifically, her focus rests on the rhetorics of cross-cultural sites such as Indigenous museums and cultural centers, and theorizing cross-cultural pedagogy through the teaching of Indigenous texts in rhetoric and composition classrooms. Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as JAC, Pedagogy, College Literature, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and American Indian Quarterly. Currently, her work continues to explore the rhetorical practices that surround and produce public representations of Indigenous peoples within the United States in museum and performance spaces, while expanding to work with contemporary German and European representations of American Indians and those representations’ rhetorical and cultural impact.

Benjamin LeMaster

Assistant Professor of Communication
Arizona State University

Benny LeMaster (they/she, never he) is a critical/cultural communication and performance scholar. They study the performative, discursive, and material constitution of cultural difference as it manifests at both individual and systemic levels. With an intersectional focus on difference, they are interested in the performance of identity, non-normative modes of relationality, and mundane performances of self and/as culture. They use both text-centered methods as well as performative and critical field methods including autoethnography, critical and performance ethnography, critical rhetorical methods, and arts-based approaches. The critical rhetorics that help shape their intersectional lens include: critical (mixed-)race, queer and trans of color, trans/feminist, and critical disability/crip theories.

Khadijah Costley White

Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies
Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Dr. Khadijah Costley White is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Previously she worked as a journalist on an Emmy-nominated team at NOW on PBS (formerly NOW with Bill Moyers) and a New York City Teaching Fellow. She is currently a 2020-2021 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow. White researches politics, social change, and identity in media. Her book, The Branding of Right-Wing Activism: The News Media and the Tea Party (Oxford, 2018) examines the rise of the Tea Party in online, print, broadcast, and cable news. She has contributed to books and published in journals such as Communication, Culture, and Critique, Urban Geography, and more.

Andre E. Johnson

Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies
University of Memphis

Andre E. Johnson, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Film at the University of Memphis. He teaches classes in African American Public Address, Rhetoric Race and Religion, Media Studies, Interracial Communication, Rhetoric, and Popular Culture, and Hip Hop Studies. He is currently collecting and editing the works of AME Church Bishop Henry McNeal Turner under the title The Literary Archive of Henry McNeal Turner (Edwin Mellen Press). He has already published the first six volumes, and the seventh one is set for publication in 2020. Additionally, along with his academic titles, he currently serves as Senior Pastor of Gifts of Life Ministries an inner-city church built upon the servant leadership philosophy in Memphis, Tennessee.

In addition to collecting the writings of Bishop Turner, Dr. Johnson is the co-author (with Amanda Nell Edgar) of The Struggle Over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter (2018) that won the 2018 National Communication Association (NCA) African American Communication and Culture Division Outstanding Book Award. He is also the author of The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (2012) that won the same national award in 2013. He is the editor of Urban God Talk: Constructing a Hip Hop Spirituality (2013) and his latest book is No Future in this Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner which the University Press of Mississippi plans to release in 2020. He is also the curator and director of the Henry McNeal Turner Project (#HMTProject); a digital archive dedicated to the writings and study of Bishop Turner.

Srividya Ramasubramanian

Presidential Impact Fellow and Professor of Communication
Texas A&M University

Dr. Srividya “Srivi” Ramasubramanian (Ph.D., Penn State University) is Presidential Impact Fellow, Professor of Communication, Affiliated Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies, and Founding Director of the Difficult Dialogues Project at Texas A&M, where she has served as Associate Dean of Liberal Arts and Center for Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow. She is also the Co-Founder and Exec. Director of Media Rise, a nonprofit for meaningful media Ramasubramanian’s scholarship addresses pressing contemporary global issues relating to media, diversity, and social justice. She is most widely recognized for her pioneering research on critical media effects, media literacy, difficult dialogues, prejudice reduction, social science methods for social justice, and community-engaged applied scholarship.

Bernadette Calafell

Professor and Chair of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies

Professor Calafell received her PhD in Communication Studies with a focus on queer Latina/o performance and a secondary focus in media studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also received a BA and MA from the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. Her research is centered on women of color feminisms, queer of color theories, monstrosity, performance studies, and critical rhetoric. She is author of the book Latina/o Communication Studies: Theorizing Performance (Peter Lang, 2007), which was the recipient of the 2009 Lilla Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance from the National Communication Association.  She also co-edited Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces: Somos de Una Voz? (Lexington, 2011) with Dr. Michelle Holling. Her most recent book, Monstrosity, Race, and Performance in Contemporary Culture, was published in 2015 by Peter Lang. In 2010, Dr. Calafell was the recipient of the Córdova-Puchot Award for Scholar of the Year by the Latina/o Communication Studies Division and La Raza Caucus of the National Communication Association.

John L. Jackson Jr.

Walter H. Annenberg Dean and Richard Perry University Professor
University of Pennsylvania

John L. Jackson, Jr., is the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice and Special Adviser to the Provost on Diversity at Penn. Jackson earned his B.A. in Communication (Radio/TV/Film) from Howard University, completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University, and served as a junior fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows before becoming Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

He is the author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2001); Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (Basic Civitas, 2008); Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Harvard University Press, 2013); Impolite Conversations: On Race, Politics, Sex, Money, and Religion, co-written with Cora Daniels (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2014), and Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment (NYU Press, 2016), co-written with Carolyn Rouse and Marla Frederick. He is also editor of Social Policy and Social Justice (2016), distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Press. His most recent film, co-directed with Deborah A. Thomas, is Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens (Third World Newsreel, 2012) Making Sweet Tea: The Lives and Loves of Southern Black Gay Men, co-directed with Nora Gross and co-executive produced with E. Patrick Johnson.

Louis M. Maraj

Assistant Professor of Composition
University of Pittsburgh

A native of Trinidad and Tobago, Louis M. Maraj thinks/creates/converses cross-disciplinarily with theoretical Black studies, rhetoric, digital media, and critical pedagogies. His scholarship specifically addresses anti/racism, anti/Blackness, and expressive form. Maraj’s Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (USUP 2020) explores notions of Blackness in historically white institutions. It asks how those racially signifying “diversity” at these institutions make meaning in the everyday, performatively arguing that Black folk must continuously invent “otherwise” in reiterative escape from their oppressive spaces. Other projects question dominant frames of antiracist thought, analyze Black feminist meaning-making in digital memes, critique epistemic violence in rhetoric and writing studies, and navigate the ‘new’ Afrocentrism of the Black Lives Matter movement. Maraj’s most recent essays can be found in Precarious Rhetorics (OSUP 2018), Prose Studies (2019), and Women’s Studies in Communication (2020), while forthcoming work will appear in a range of rhetoric/writing studies spaces—like Self+Culture+Writing (USUP)—and interdisciplinary fora—such as The Routledge Handbook of Police Brutality in America. In the classroom, Dr. Lou engages fellow participants’ lived experiences in dialogic knowledge-making, attempting to destabilize boundaries across received genres (of expression and being), infrastructural spaces, and media. With Khirsten Scott, Maraj co-directs DBLAC, a support network for emerging Black scholars in fields related to language. He continues years of social justice work with Black youth—in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood through Justice Scholars—and with Pitt students—through Change Pittsburgh, a student-writing archive. For freely available antiracist learning/teaching material, see loumaraj.com.

Kent Ono

Professor of Communication
University of Utah

Kent A. Ono is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. Professor Ono conducts critical and theoretical research of print, film, and television media, specifically focusing on representations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation. He has contributed articles to numerous journals including: Communication Monographs, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Communication Inquiry, Western Journal of Communication, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Amerasia Journal, and Journal of Asian American Studies. He has authored Contemporary Media Culture and the Remnants of a Colonial Past (Peter Lang, 2009). Also, in addition to co-authoring Asian Americans and the Media with Vincent Pham (Polity 2009) and Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 with John Sloop (Temple University Press, 2002), he has co-edited Critical Rhetorics of Race with Michael Lacy (New York University Press, 2011) and Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek with Taylor Harrison, Sarah Projansky, and Elyce Helford (Westview Press, 1996) and has edited Asian American Studies after Critical Mass (Blackwell, 2005) and A Companion to Asian American Studies (Blackwell, 2005). Ono chaired Utah's Department of Communication from 2012-2017. He is past editor of the journal Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. He is past coeditor of the book series “Critical Cultural Communication” with Sarah Banet-Weiser at New York University Press. He is also past co-editor of the journal Critical Studies in Media Communication with Ronald L Jackson II. He was elected Second Vice President of the National Communication Association and will be President of that Association beginning January 2020.

Lisa Corrigan

Professor of Communication and Director of Gender Studies
University of Arkansas

Dr. Lisa M. Corrigan (Ph.D. University of Maryland) is an Associate Professor of Communication, Director of the Gender Studies Program, and Affiliate Faculty in both African & African American Studies and Latin American Studies at the University of Arkansas. Her first book, Prison Power: How Prison Politics Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), is the recipient of the 2017 Diamond Anniversary Book Award and the 2017 African American Communication and Culture Division Outstanding Book Award both from the National Communication Association. Her second book is titled, Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties (University Press of Mississippi, 2020). Her writings and reviews have appeared in: Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Women & Language, Communication Quarterly, The National Journal of Urban Education and Practice, The Journal of Post-Colonial Writing, Intertexts, Review of Communication, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Howard Journal of Communication, Women’s Studies in Communication, Southern Journal of Communication, and QED: A Journal in Queer Worldmaking. She is also a contributor to the Indivisible Guide and regularly leads political trainings and workshops in Arkansas and around the country. Finally, she co-hosts a podcast with Laura Weiderhaft called Lean Back: Critical Feminist Conversations, which, in 2017, was named the top podcast in Arkansas and one of the top thirty-five podcasts in the country by Paste magazine.

Michael Lechuga

Assistant Professor of Communication
University of New Mexico

Dr. Michael Lechuga researches and teaches Latina/o/x Studies Communication Studies, Rhetoric, Migration and Settler Colonialism Studies, and Affect Studies. He graduated with an M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2007 and with a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Denver in 2016. His research explores the ways migrants and migrant communities are subjected in the US by austere migration control structures and white nationalist ideologies. His current research focuses on the role that technology plays in border security assemblages and the ways alienhood is mapped onto migrant bodies through contemporary mechanisms of white-settler governance. In addition, Dr. Lechuga is interested in Latina/o/x Futurism, Surveillance Studies, and Film Studies. He is currently writing his second book, Alien Affects, which illuminates the complex relationships between Hollywood alien invasion film industries  and the industries tasked with securing the México/U.S. border.

Walid Afifi

Professor of Interpersonal Health Communication and Director of Center for Middle Eastern Studies
UC Santa Barbara

Walid A. Afifi (PhD, University of Arizona) is an author on over 70 articles, chapters, and books, recently served as Chair of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa (2013-2016), occupied the role of Associate Editor for both the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships and Personal Relationships, and was elected as chair of the Interpersonal Division for both the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association. His program of research revolves around uncertainty and information-management decisions and has led to the development and refinement of the Theory of Motivated Information Management.  That work has increasingly focused on immigrant communities and/or communities experiencing trauma.  He teaches classes related to interpersonal communication, nonverbal communication, relational communication, and uncertainty.  He is committed to research, teaching, and service that involves and empowers all communities, and has been recognized for that commitment by UCSB’s Resource Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity through an Esteemed Ally Award. His program of life revolves around, and the (usually) calming influence on his personal experiences of uncertainty are, his wife, Tammy, their two children (Leila and Rania), and two dogs (Maddi and Charles Jackson).

Rico Self

Assistant Professor of Communication
Southwestern University

Dr. Rico Self is as an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies and affiliate faculty in the Feminist Studies and Race and Ethnicity Studies Programs at Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX. His research, which is located at the intersections of rhetoric, performance, critical race studies, and gender and sexuality studies, is concerned with (1) how racialized, gendered, and queer bodies are discursively and performatively constituted in historic and contemporary American culture and (2) the ways in which such constitutions may challenge and/or upend systems of privilege and oppression. His published scholarship can be found in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies with other essays slated for publication in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking and Women’s Studies in Communication. A native of the Mississippi Delta region, Dr. Self received his PhD in communication studies with minors in African and African American studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge; an MA in English language and literature from Jackson State University in Jackson, MS; and an MA in communication, media, and theatre from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, IL. In his spare time, Dr. Self enjoys reading, traveling, and spending time with family and friends.

Francesca Sobande

Lecturer in Digital Media Studies
Cardiff University

Francesca is a lecturer in Digital Media Studies at JOMEC, with research interests and expertise in issues related to race, gender, structural inequalities, media, and the marketplace. She is Course Director of the BA Media, Journalism and Culture programme. Francesca’s work particularly focuses on digital culture, Black identity and diaspora, feminism, celebrity, the creative and cultural industries, and popular culture. She is an affiliate of the Data Justice Lab and is Communication Co-Chair (with Dr Naya Jones) of the Race in the Marketplace Research Network. Previously, Francesca was a lecturer in Marketing and Advertising (Edge Hill University), a tutor in Marketing and Management (University of Dundee), and worked in communications in higher education, the arts, and not-for-profit sector. Francesca has published work on YouTube, digital blackness, and Black women's online media experiences (European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Consumption Markets & Culture), "woke-washing" and brands' (mis)use of social justice activism (European Journal of Marketing), celebrity and authenticity (Celebrity Studies), CGI influencer culture (Television & New Media), digital remix culture and British politics (IPPR Progressive Review), Black diasporic media (Communication, Culture & Critique), as well as the role of gender archetypes in marketing the assisted reproductive technology and fertility industry (Marketing Theory). She is author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (2020, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor with Professor Akwugo Emejulu of To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (2019, Pluto Press). Francesca has commented on such topics for Al Jazeera, BBC News, ABC News, The Guardian, and Quartz, as well as at public engagement events at the Wellcome Collection, Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Foundation for Art and Creative Technology.

Myra Washington

Assistant Vice President for Faculty Equity and Diversity and Associate Professor in Ethnic Studies University of Utah

Myra Washington is Assistant Vice President for Faculty Equity and Diversity and an Associate Professor in Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah. Her research is situated in the areas of cultural studies, critical media and digital media studies, celebrity studies, comparative ethnic studies (with a focus on African-American and Asian American studies), critical rhetoric, gender and sexuality studies, and the emerging field of critical mixed-race studies. The critical focus in her research means that she is always examining the ways power enhances or elides the way we understand meta-narratives of identity like race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, etc. She focuses on mediated representations because she is interested in contextualizing the moments that shape representations as they appear and how in turn those representations shape our understandings of each other. Her most recent publication is her book, Blasian Invasion: Racial Mixing in the Celebrity Industrial Complex (University of Mississippi, 2017) which theorizes mixed raceness through the racial subjectivities embodied by self-identified “Blasian” (mixed race Black and Asian) celebrities that both does not abjure Blackness and decenters Whiteness as the paradigms of understanding mixed race peoples and race in general.

Ralina Joseph

Associate Dean of Equity & Justice in Graduate Programs, Professor of Communication, and Founding and Acting Director of the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity

Ralina Joseph is a Professor of Communication and adjunct Professor of American Ethnic Studies and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, is a scholar, teacher, and facilitator of race and communication. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego and B. A. in American Civilization from Brown University. Dr. Joseph is the founding and acting director of the University of Washington’s Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity. Her first book, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial, critiques anti-Black racism in mixed-race African American representations in the decade leading up to Obama’s 2008 election. She is currently writing two new books. The first, Generation Mixed Goes to School: Fostering Mixed-Race Spaces in School Communities, (with Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith, under contract with Teachers College Press), centers the perspectives of multiracial children in the creation of anti-racist schools. The second, Interrupting Privilege: The Promises and Perils of Talking Race and Fighting Racism, provides both the theoretical framework and a nuts-and-bolts guidebook to fighting back against every day, interpersonal inequalities.

Christa Olson

Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Christa Olson is a rhetorical historian focusing on transamerican visual cultures. In her research, she returns repeatedly to the rhetorical sources and consequences of nationalism. She is the author of Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador (Penn State UP 2014) and the forthcoming American Magnitude: Hemispheric Visions and Public Feeling in the United States (Ohio State UP 2021). She has been a regular contributor to Reading the Pictures, an online venue dedicated to public-facing analysis of photojournalism. Olson’s institutional leadership includes service as the faculty director of UW-Madison’s English 201 intermediate writing program and chair of the UW-Madison program in Composition and Rhetoric as well as stints on the Board of Directors for the Rhetoric Society of America and the Steering Committee of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. She has chaired both Societies’ awards committee and helped shepherd major revisions to both awards policies in order to bring them in line with inclusion, diversity, equity, and access goals

Omar Al-Ghazzi

Assistant Professor of Media and Communications
London School of Economics

Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. His research expertise is in the reporting and representation of conflict, digital journalism and the politics of time and memory— with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Before joining LSE, he was a lecturer (assistant professor) at the Department of Journalism, the University of Sheffield. Dr Al-Ghazzi completed his PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication, the University of Pennsylvania. He holds MAs in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania and American University and a BA in Communication Arts from the Lebanese American University. His research has appeared in the field of communication’s top journals including Communication Theory and the International Journal of Communication and was recognized by the International Communication Association. A former Fulbright scholar, Dr Al-Ghazzi comes from a journalism professional background and has previously worked at Al-Hayat Arabic daily and BBC Monitoring.

Vani Kannan

Assistant Professor of Communication and Co-Director of Writing Across the Curriculum
Lehman University

Vani Kannan’s research interests include transnational/women-of-color feminisms, community literacies, multimodal/multigenre composition, and social-justice-oriented writing pedagogies. She is on the steering committee for the Women’s and Gender Studies program, co-coordinates Writing Across the Curriculum, and teaches a range of courses that include Writing and Social Issues, Women in Literature (with a focus on women-of-color writers), Creative Nonfiction, and graduate-level courses in Rhetoric and Composition. Her work has appeared in Writers: Craft & Context, Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, Studies on Asia, and the edited collection The Political Turn in the Trump Era: Writing, Democracy, Activism. Additionally, she has co-authored articles for Journal of Writing Assessment, Community Literacy Journal, Reflections: Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning, Literacy in Composition Studies, and Journal of Academic Freedom. Her current research project looks at post-9/11 rhetorics of the Hindu Indian diaspora in the U.S., with attention to the intersections of race, class, caste, religion, sexuality, ability, language, and gendered norms.

Carmen Kynard

Professor and Lillian Radford Chair of Rhetoric and Composition and Professor of English
Texas Christian University

Carmen Kynard is the Lillian Radford Chair in Rhetoric and Composition and Professor of English at Texas Christian University. Before TCU, she worked in English and Gender Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice as well as English, Urban Education, and Critical Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She interrogates race, Black feminisms, AfroDigital/African American cultures and languages, and the politics of schooling with an emphasis on composition and literacies studies. Carmen has led numerous professional development projects on language, literacy, and learning and has published in Harvard Educational Review, Changing English, College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition, Reading Research Quarterly, Literacy and Composition Studies and more. Her award-winning book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies makes Black Freedom a 21st century literacy movement. Her current projects focus on young Black women in college, Black Feminist/Afrofuturist digital vernaculars, and AfroDigital Humanities learning. Carmen co-edits the inaugural journal run of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture and maintains numerous web projects including: 1) Black Feminist Pedagogies.com: Open Graduate Coursework Towards an Anti-Racist/Intersected/Black Feminist University, 2) Funkdafied: An Open Digital Classroom Dedicated to African American Literacies, Rhetorics, and Resistance, and 3) Digi Rhetorics: Digital Justice/ Digital Rhetorics. Her latest digital project is in collaboration with Dr. April Baker-Bell at Michigan State University on the Black Language Syllabus which also houses the Black Language Magazine. Carmen traces her research and teaching at her website, “Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions” (http://carmenkynard.org) which has garnered over 1.8 million hits since its 2012 inception.

Kimberly Moffitt

Interim Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Professor of Language, Literacy & Culture
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Dr. Kimberly R. Moffitt (kmoffitt@umbc.edu) is Interim Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, professor of Language, Literacy & Culture and affiliate professor of Africana Studies. Her teaching interests include culture, media studies/criticism, Black hair and body politics, sports and media, and popular culture. Dr. Moffitt’s research focuses on mediated representations of marginalized groups as well as the politicized nature of Black hair and the body. She has published four co-edited volumes, including Gladiators in Suits: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Representation in Scandal (Syracuse University Press, 2019), Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair and Body Politics in Africana Communities (Hampton Press, 2010), The Obama Effect: Multidisciplinary Renderings of the 2008 Campaign (SUNY Press, 2010) and The 1980s: A Transitional Decade? (Lexington Books, 2011). She has a forthcoming volume exploring the legacy of former First Lady Michelle Obama.  Additionally, Moffitt has also published her work in academic journals and several edited volumes. Her current research projects continue to explore the black body such as her work exploring white femininity in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog and the representations of Black males on Disney television programming. She extends her research interests into the community by offering workshops on Black hair and body politics as it relates to bullying among middle school girls. Dr. Moffitt often writes op-ed articles for the Baltimore Sun and is a frequent guest on local public radio and Internet broadcasting programs. She is a member of the public service sorority, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., and the founding parent and former board member of Baltimore Collegiate School for Boys Charter School, a 4th-8th college preparatory school.

André Brock

Associate Professor of Literature, Media & Communication
Georgia Tech University

André L. Brock joins the School of Literature, Media, and Communication as an associate professor. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with an M.A. in English and Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His scholarship includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as groundbreaking research on Black Twitter. His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter, in particular, continues to evolve.

Karma Chávez

Department Chair and Associate Professor of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies
UT Austin

My scholarship is primarily informed by queer of color theory and women of color feminism. Methodologically, I am a rhetorical critic who utilizes textual and field-based methods. I am interested in studying social movement building, activist rhetoric, and coalitional politics. My work emphasizes the rhetorical practices of groups marginalized within existing power structures, but I also attend to rhetoric produced by powerful institutions and actors about marginalized folks and the systems that oppress them (e.g., immigration system, prisons etc.). In 2013, I published my first book, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, which examines coalition building at the many intersections of queer and immigration politics in the contemporary United States. In 2019, I published a book of interviews I conducted related to Palestine while hosting a radio show on WORT-FM in Madison, Wisconsin. That book is called Palestine on the Air.  I have co-edited two volumes, Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method and Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies. Two co-edited volumes are forthcoming: Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation (with Eithne Luibhéid, U of Illinois Press) and Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (with Kyla Tompkins, Aren Aizura, Aimee Bahng, Mishuana Goeman, and Amber Musser, NYU Press). My new book, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance will be released from the University of Washington Press in spring 2021. The Borders of AIDS centers citizenship and immigration status to tell a story about how HIV/AIDS became an opportunity for powerful people in the US to enact "alienizing logic" against migrants, Black folks, and others. With M. Adams, I am working on a collection of essays about our community-university collaborations in Madison, Wisconsin called, After Ferguson: Black, Queer, Feminist Experiments Against Police and Jails.

Alexandrina Agloro

Assistant Professor of the Future of Innovation in Society
Arizona State University

Alexandrina Agloro’s eclectic mix of research interests make her an ideal fit for the interdisciplinary environment of SFIS. From exploring the use of games in “unexpected places” to writing a book about community-engaged game design to prototyping ovulation-tracking jewelry, Agloro invests intense energy into all of her varied activities. One of Agloro’s core research questions is, “how do we capitalize on the intrinsic motivations of play?” She is exploring how to focus the motivation people find in playing games toward advancing social justice. In the world of games, her primary emphasis is on interactive experiences. “They all have some kind of technological component,” she explained. “But they will also force you to go into the real world and interact with other people. My specialty is in alternate reality games which are online-offline world adventures that are more like theatrical performances. They're ephemeral for a very brief period of time, but also have all these game elements.” With a masters degree in ethnic studies and a PhD in Communication, she said, “I went from being in a race studies program using technology, to being in a technology program looking at race and its effect on technology.” As an example, Agloro is interested in ways that land, water, and internet sovereignty are linked, which led to the development of a game about redesigning communities, known as settlement reblocking, in South Africa. Another retells a traditional story of indigenous people in Alaska, creating an engaging modern oral history. Agloro is in the process of completing a postdoctoral fellowship with the Ford Foundation for which she is finishing her book manuscript on case studies of communities of color who are using games to effect change. She is also building a game as an educational tool around the concept of reproductive justice, and she is prototyping ovulation tracking jewelry “to create an affordable and flawlessly stylish device that frees us from stigma and shame about women's bodies."

Sasha Costanza-Chock

Associate Professor of Civic Media and Mitsui Career Development Professor in Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Faculty Associate at Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society
Harvard University

Sasha Costanza-Chock (they/them or she/her) is a researcher and designer who works to support community-led processes that build shared power, move towards collective liberation, and advance ecological survival. They are known for their work on networked social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha is a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Senior Research Fellow at the Algorithmic Justice League (ajlunited.org), and a Faculty Affiliate with the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Sasha is the author of two books and numerous journal articles, book chapters, and other research publications. Their new book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, was published by the MIT Press in 2020. Sasha is a board member of Allied Media Projects (alliedmedia.org) and a member of the Steering Committee of the Design Justice Network (designjustice.org).

Sean Jacobs

Associate Professor of International Affairs
The New School

Sean Jacobs is associate professor of international affairs at the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs at The New School. He is founder and editor of Africa is a Country, a site of criticism, analysis and new writing. His book, Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization, was published on May Day 2019.

Lori Kido Lopez

Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Director of the Asian American Studies Program University of Wisconsin-Madison

Lori Kido Lopez is an Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Communication Arts department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  She also Director of the Asian American Studies Program at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Lopez is the author of Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship and Micro Media Industries: Hmong American Media Innovation in the Diaspora, editor of Race and Media: Critical Approaches, and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Asian American Media.  She is a Co-Editor at the International Journal for Cultural Studies.  Her work examines race and ethnicity in the media through a cultural studies lens, deploying ethnography and interviews to examine the way that Asian Americans and other minority groups use media in the fight for social justice.  Her current research examines Asian American documentaries and digital networks.

Dr. Lopez received a PhD in Communication from the University of Southern California, an MA in Mass Communication from Indiana University, and a BA in Asian Studies and Media Studies from Pomona College.  She is mixed race Japanese American and is originally from Portland, OR.

Chenjerai Kumanyika

Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies
Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Chenjerai Kumanyika is a researcher, journalist, an artist who works as an assistant professor in Rutgers University’s Department of Journalism and Media Studies. His research and teaching focus on the intersections of social justice and emerging media in the cultural and creative industries. He has written about these issues in journals such as Popular Music & Society, Popular Communication, The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture and Technology, Pedagogy and Education. Currently, Kumanyika is the Co-Executive Producer and Co-Host of Gimlet Media’s new podcast on the Civil War. He has also been a contributor to Transom, NPR Codeswitch, All Things Considered, Invisibilia, VICE, and he is a news analyst for Rising Up Radio with Sonali Kolhatkar.

Rachel Kuo

Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Dr. Rachel Kuo writes, teaches, and researches race, social movements, and digital technology. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has a PhD and MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, and BA in Journalism from the University of Missouri. Her current manuscript, Movement Media: Racial Solidarities Across Platforms, demonstrates how technologies enhance and foreclose possibilities for political organization across uneven racial and class difference. Her research brings together archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, data and network analysis, and participatory action research emphasizing Asian American political formations in digital ecosystems. She works closely with community partners in developing her research, and her longer-term research goals and questions center and engage emergent questions and practices from grassroots social movements.  She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and also a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective.

Ergin Bulut

Associate Professor of Media and Visual Arts
Koç University

Ergin Bulut received his PhD from the Institute of Communications Research at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Currently, he works as an Associate Professor at Koç University's Media and Visual Arts Department, where he teaches classes on media industries, video game studies, media sociology, and media and populism. He researches in the area of political economy of media and cultural production, video game studies, media and politics, and critical theory. His work has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Triple C, International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Television and New Media, and Communication and Critical-Cultural Studies. In 2019-2020 academic year, Bulut was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and faculty fellow at Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at UPenn.

Paula Chakravartty

Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication
New York University

Paula Chakravartty is associate professor at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communication. Her research and teaching interests span comparative political economy, migration, labor and social movements, and decolonial and critical race theory. Her books include Race, Empire and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Media Policy and Globalization (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), and Global Communications: Towards a Transcultural Political Economy (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008). Recent publications include #CommunicationSoWhite (2018) in the Journal of Communication, and two special issues on “Mediatized Populisms: Inter-Asian Lineages” for the International Journal of Communication (December 2017) and “Infrastructures of Empire: Towards a Critical Geopolitics of Media and Information Studies” for Media, Culture and Society (2016). Her current research focuses on racial capitalism and global media infrastructures, and migrant labor mobility and justice. Chakravartty is a member of the NYU Sanctuary Coalition. She serves on the executive board of the NYU Association for University Professors (AAUP), and is affiliated faculty at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, South Asia @ NYU, and the NYU Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Diana Isabel Martínez

Assistant Professor of Communication
Pepperdine University

Diana Isabel Martínez, Ph.D.is an Assistant Professor of Communication in the Communication Division at Seaver College. Her research explores physical and psychological borderlands, a term coined by Gloria Anzaldúa to describe spaces of social, political, and cultural struggle. She is working on archival research with the Gloria Anzaldúa collection, and she is also interested in issues surrounding social movements, intercultural dialogue, public memory, and visual rhetoric. Her recent published research has appeared in journals such as Communication Quarterly and The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics as well as edited books. She co-edited the monograph Latina/o Communication Studies: Theories, Methods, and Practice and currently serves on the editorial board of the Western Journal of Communication. She teaches courses in rhetoric and leadership, communication studies, and culture.

Lucy Miller

Lecturer in Communication
Texas A&M University

Dr. Miller analyzes discourses of power and identity in the contexts of marginalization in media and the public sphere from a critical rhetoric perspective. Systems of power impact all aspects of our lives, from how transgender people are treated in public spaces to how patriarchal oppression of women persists in our genderblind society. A major area of interest of her research is civic engagement, which spans from the treatment of transgender people, women, and other marginalized groups in the public sphere to the transformation of fan participation into citizenship to the rhetorical analysis of political figures. As an example of the first, she recently published a book titled Genderblindness in American Society: The Rhetoric of a System of Social Control of Women (Lexington, 2019) that analyzes how gender is diminished in public life by a system of genderblindness that removes gender from public persuasive appeals. Another major area of interest in her research is transgender representation in media. A primary example of her current work in this area is a book project titled Distancing Representations: Identification, Affect, and the Audience for Transgender Film, a proposal for which is currently under review at the University of Minnesota Press. The project analyzes how transgender representations in film are constructed narratively and visually to elicit the affective responses of ridicule, fear, disgust, and sympathy from a cisgender audience in line with a cisnormative ideology. Dr. Miller’s research connects the disparagements, constraints, and empowerments experienced in our everyday lives to larger systems of power in order to explore the co-constructed nature of identity.

Hector Amaya

Professor of Communication
University of Southern California

Hector Amaya is a professor of communication in the USC Annenberg. He has authored three books and has published dozens of articles on the issues of globalization, Latin American media, comparative media studies, immigration, and Latinx media studies. A leader in his intellectual community, Amaya is the past chair of the Latina/o Communication Studies Division of the National Communication Association (NCA), the past chair of NCA’s La Raza Caucus, and the past chair of the Latino Caucus of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. His most recent work, Trafficking: Narcoculture in Mexico and the United States (forthcoming with Duke University Press), analyzes the way Mexico’s criminal drug violence and new media technologies structure publicness in Mexico and the United States. His previous book, Citizenship Excess: Latinas/os, Media and the Nation (NYU Press), examines the mainstreaming after 9/11 of anti-Latino nativism in politics and in media. His first book, Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance During the Cold War (University of Illinois Press), is a comparative study of film reception of Cuban film, cultural criticism, and citizenship in Cuba and the USA from the 1960s to 1985. Amaya was born and raised in Mexico and began his education at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Mexico City). He has advanced degrees from the University of Calgary and the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining USC Annenberg, Amaya was a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. He is a past member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton in the School of Social Science.

Ersula Ore

Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Arizona State University

Ersula J. Ore is the Lincoln Professor of Ethics in the School of Social Transformation and associate professor of African and African American studies and rhetoric at Arizona State University. Her work examines the suasive strategies of aggrieved communities as they operate within a post-emancipation historical context. Her book "Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity" (University of Mississippi Press, 2019), Winner of the 2020 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award, explores lynching as a racialized practice of civic engagement that has, from the 1880s onward, communicated the meanings and boundaries of citizenship in the U.S. The book gives particular attention to the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. Professor Ore is a 2013 Institute for Humanities Research Fellow at ASU and a 2011 Penn State Alumni Association Dissertation Award Recipient. Her work can be found in the Women Studies in Commiunication, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Pedagogy, Present Tense, Rhetoric & Public Affairs and in Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education (SIUP Press, 2016), Winner of the 2018 Conference on College Composition & Communication Outstanding Book Award in the Edited Collection.