Dharani Persaud (they/she) is a writer and PhD student in the School of Information at the University of British Columbia. Their research interests centre on Caribbean indenture diaspora studies, the role of archives in the construction of nations and communities, and the subversion of colonial archives. Dharani is currently an uninvited settler on the traditional, ancestral, and stolen lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

Dr. Nadejda I. Webb is the Assistant Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Center for Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Webb's teaching and research interests include 20th- and 21st-century African American and postcolonial literature, as well as digital humanities, imaginaries, and representation. She earned a joint Ph.D. in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice from Vanderbilt University and a B.A. in English Language and Literature from CUNY Hunter College.

Jazdil Poupart-Feliciano is an abolitionist educator who dreams of and works towards emancipatory educational spaces, joy and liberation for Black and queer people everywhere and the abolition of prisons and all colonial structures in Puerto Rico and beyond. They have a background in sociology and human rights education and is currently a doctoral student in the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Policy Studies in Education program at Stanford University Graduate School of Education. 

Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Isabelle Hernandez Repollet is a Caribbean feminist committed to community engagement and building power and resources from within to foster sustainable, abolitionist change. She has participated in activist efforts against gender-based violence, displacement, and racist colonial practices while working as a social worker in educational spaces, sexual health, reproductive autonomy, and housing for survivors of gender-based violence. Pursuing a master's in City & Regional Planning with a focus on Housing, Economic, and Community Development, she is currently working as a student researcher on homelessness and cash assistance at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation and serving as a program liaison for Brightline Defense, an environmental justice nonprofit in San Francisco.

Elizabeth Shaffer is an Assistant Professor, UBC’s School of Information (unceded xwməθkwəy̓əm territory). With attention to justice, race and gender, her research focuses on critical enquiry into records and information theory, practices, and digital infrastructures, the ongoing influence of colonialism, and collections that document traumatic human events. She leads the digital archive team on the SSHRC funded Transformative Memory International Network engaging Indigenous, Black and Southern knowledges in exploring how memory as a mechanism is conceived, documented and practiced in public policy and scholarship on mass atrocity. 

Jimena Perez is a community-engaged scholar and a UC Berkeley Geography Ph.D. student from Southeast Los Angeles (SELA). Framing the Los Angeles River as a site of theory, history, and speculation, her work explores the multiplicity of worlds that the river produces, with and through L.A. County residents who labor against state-sanctioned violence in pursuit of livable futures that sustain local lifeways and protect communities.

Bri Matusovsky is a PhD Candidate in the UCSF-UC Berkeley Joint PhD Program in Medical Anthropology. They research sites of encounter between people and invasive green monkeys on St. Kitts, including on farms, eco-tourist destinations, and in laboratories. In their free time, Bri teaches yoga classes, meditates, and likes to try baking different flavors of scones. 

Christin Washington is a PhD Candidate in the Department of American Studies and a Flagship Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also a Graduate Research Assistant with the African American Digital & Experimental Humanities (AADHum) research and design lab. She uses speculative mapping to look at Caribbean women’s lives in the context of mourning, geographies, and digital infrastructure.

A graduate in Hispanic Philology from the University of Murcia (Spain), Gabriel Carrión conducts research in ecocriticism and ecomarxism at the University of Oregon where he is a doctoral student, in addition to teaching in Spanish. 

J’Anna Lue (she/her) is a 3rd year Civil and Environmental Engineering PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in the reparative capacity of engineering in thinking through questions of climate justice in the Caribbean. J’Anna is interested in the ways colonial world building has influenced built, natural, and social infrastructures in Jamaica which in turn impact communities' ability to cope with the realities of climate change. 

Anna Palmer is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the convergence of extractivism, (post)colonial development, and the climate crisis in the Caribbean through a qualitative and spatial lens. Her current project focuses on political decision-making and resistance to oil extraction in Guyana through content analysis and interview methods. Anna is also a co-founder of the Caribbean Coalition at Berkeley. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Occidental College and an M.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Adriana Gonzales (MS, Energy and Resources Group, 2024) is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography at Berkeley. She is interested in pasts, presents, and futures of coloniality, disaster, and survival of communities and peasantries across the Caribbean. At present, Adriana is investigating political ecologies of catastrophe in Dominica from the 19th century to the post-Hurricane Maria present, through the lens of built and social infrastructures. Adriana is also a co-founder of the Caribbean Coalition at Berkeley.

Dr. Steffon Campbell is a Trinbagonian Strategic Communication Lecturer at the Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, a published author, freelance journalist, and communication consultant. He also serves on the Board of Directors for the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Hampton Roads Chapter. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Policy, an M.A. in Communication Studies, and a B.A. in Media and Communication (with first-class honors). His areas of specialization include communication for development, gender, social policy, and investigative journalism.

Angela Pastorelli-Sosa is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation examines four contemporary Latinx artists who interrogate the co-construction of space and identity through contested geographies they are intimately familiar with; these include borders, commonwealths, and urban environments. Angela’s research has been supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino, where she is currently a predoctoral fellow.

José Eduardo Valdivia Heredia (they/elle/ellx) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. José's research looks at visual culture and performance in the Black Atlantic at the intersection of the environment, gender, spirituality, and technology. Their research interests include Afro-Atlantic religions; Caribbean ecologies; critical humanist & posthumanist studies; performance studies & visual culture; trans* of color studies; and science & technology studies. 

Nathaniel Télémaque is a North West London-born and raised visual artist, writer, and researcher. Nathaniel earned his PhD in Geography (practice-related) from University College London and is now a Lecturer in Geography and Social Justice at King’s College London University. His interests are in Global Black geographies, urban and cultural geographies, visual practices, and archival research. His research and visual practices are orientated to attending to everyday experiences situated in and around stigmatised locales in London. Nathaniel’s research interests cuts across the fields of human geography, urban studies, and architectural history. He positions the photographs he makes with people and places as visual materials, capable of generating nuanced geographical dialogues with researchers, students, and creative practitioners.

Nathaniel’s research focuses on centering and framing everyday Black experiences via the utilisation of collaborative photographic practices. He is also committed to making portraits with places as a means of intervening in their representations. Combining his practice-based approaches to photography, soundscapes and film with human geography research techniques such as the use of photo-elicitation interviews and visual ethnography, his research is advanced with people and places as opposed to working on people and places.

Melissa Beckford holds a BA (first-class honors) in History, Master of Arts in History Education from the University of the West Indies Mona. She is currently enrolled in the MPHIL/PHD Programme in Cultural Studies. Melissa is a high school teacher and a Chief Examiner with the CXC, the current President of the History Teachers Association of Jamaica and Communications Director of the Save the Children Campaign (a charity organization). She is also co-founder and CEO of Expert Educational & Professional Consultants: a humanities-based company. Mantra: Ignorance enslaves; the knowledge of God, liberates

(Presenting via Zoom)

Jacqueline Lyon, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Chicanx and Latiné Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Her work focuses on race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the Caribbean. Her work has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies and the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Her book project, Inherited Illegality: Race, Reproduction and the Fight for Birthright Citizenship in the Dominican Republic examines how emergent Dominican activist movements articulate demands for racial and national belonging in the aftermath of policies revoking birthright citizenship.

Dr. Thabisile Griffin, PhD, is a historian specializing in the 18th century Atlantic world, Black indigeneity, and colonial insecurity. She has published in various outlets, including Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, The Funambulist, and the Journal of Architectural Education, and has lectured and presented her research at Yale, UCLA, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at UPenn. Thabisile is an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowship recipient, and has lectured and programmed for the Global Racisms program and Ambedkar Initiative in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Currently, she is now Liberal Arts faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles.

Matthew Alexander Randolph (he/him) is a historian and geographer investigating Black identities and connections across the (Afro-)Atlantic World. He is a PhD Candidate in History at Stanford University who has conducted archival work throughout the Americas and Europe. He is also a former graduate fellow and instructor for the Stanford Department of African & African American Studies. In 2023, Randolph lived in the Dominican Republic as a Fulbright research fellow. 

His interdisciplinary scholarship retraces the story of African Americans who dreamed of freedom beyond U.S. borders, sailing southward in 1824 and settling along Samaná Bay in the northeastern region of the island (then part of Haiti). The research promises to enrich our knowledge of Black people's ancestral and ongoing ecological relationships as stewards of land and waterways across the Americas. His work is informed by scholarship on Afrofuturism, Black Geographies/Ecologies, and Caribbean Studies, as well as inquiry into the afterlives of slavery. Outside of academia, he is passionate about public history, community-building, and social justice in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nila Seelan is a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying in the Department of Anthropology. Her tri-continental research focuses on the Caribbean, West Africa, and India’s deep South, engaging with intertwining political-literary currents such as Dravidianism, Afrocentricity and Négritude that sought to unite “the darker races of the darker nations”.

Ana Blanco is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research studies how people navigate identity and belonging upon migration. She is currently working on a project that explores how food establishments in the Bay Area create a sense of place for Caribbean people in diaspora.

Keston K. Perry, PhD., is a political economist and Assistant Professor at the Department of African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. His work examines race as an ordering driver in the global economy, paying particular attention to the entangled effects of global finance, economic governance, imperialism, colonialism, and climate justice, by drawing upon Caribbean plantation economy, the Black Radical Tradition, and the region’s social and economic history. By using materialist and empirically grounded analysis, he investigates how these issues affect the persistent ecological, economic, and political marginalization of Caribbean communities and how these communities organize across various sites against these intersecting challenges. He has previously taught at Williams College, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK, and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Climate Policy Lab, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.

Sedney Suarez Gordon is a graduate student of Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of California, Merced where he investigates the parallelism and intersection of Caribbean studies and contemporary Philosophy of mathematics. He is a Colombian Fulbright grantee who holds an M.Sc. in mathematics, he has served his Raizal community in the archipelago of San Andres, Providencia, and Santa Catalina as a teacher, writer, and translator of plays and performances in the Creole language of his people. Currently, he is the associate director of Shakespeare in Yosemite.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, focusing on the literary activism and global solidarities that coalesced around the Grenadian revolution. As a journalist, he has reported from a dozen countries across Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa, and is the author of Becoming Kwame Ture (Chimurenga, 2020), about Stokely Carmichael's time in Africa. His work has appeared in the Guardian, Aljazeera, and the Daily Telegraph, among others.

Colin Walker Wingate is a 4th year PhD student in English Literature at UC Davis. Working from within a Caribbean intellectual tradition, they centers the possibilities of encounter between Black Studies and Dalit Studies unmoored from their position within the analogical fulcrum (Race=Caste) of US based comparative theorizations of colonization. They explore how such encounters is informed by a politics/poetics of imagination – indebted to a Black queer diaspora tradition and Dalit literary traditions – that refuse repertoires of repair/redress/recovery.

Isaiah Blake is a first-year PhD student in Geography at UC Berkeley from Brooklyn, New York. His research asks: Can Black people prepare for natural disasters? As a Black geographer, he examines how disaster preparedness, ecological restoration, and repair are entangled with anti-Blackness, thus structuring the material and discursive production of ecological emergencies. He is particularly interested in how water infrastructures and riparian restoration—dams, culverts, flood control systems—act as technologies of racialized containment and displacement that extend plantation logics.

At the same time, he is interested in how Black people generate rupture through practices rooted in ancestral memory, subsistence, resistance, and transcendence.  Drawing on Alagraa (2021), he asks how we might “break the meter?”