Alumni

Dr. Saudi Garcia is a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2022-24) and incoming Assistant Professor (2024-) at The New School’s Department of Anthropology. She is a writer, ethnographic researcher and social transformation practitioner who theorizes racial capitalism and ecological crisis from her social location as an Afro-Caribbean queer feminist and first-generation immigrant. Deeply concerned with all Caribbean people’s relationships to land, ecology and environmental health in the midst of the climate crisis, Dr. Garcia’s dissertation focused on the modern history of gold mining and tailing dam development in the Dominican Republic. She examined the contemporary health effects and forms of resistance to gold mining, ecological destruction and water scarcity through a framework attentive to how Black rural Dominicans draw on ancestral knowledge to refuse toxicity as an embodied manifestation of racial hierarchy. Dr. Garcia is a graduate of Brown University, New York University’s Department of Anthropology and its Culture and Media program. She volunteers as a facilitator for the Dominican-Haitian peace and reconciliation organization In Cultured Company. 

During the semester, Saudi will be working on theorizing and thinking with what she is calling “Leftoverism.” This is a mode of thinking about matter and humans considered “leftovers” of capitalism, its processes of global migration, extraction and production. She is working on a piece thinking about this topic, and she is working on two book projects to think through where the personal and political aspects of this piece can find their best home. 

Dr. Christine Goding-Doty is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Media in Eugene Lang College and the Department of Culture and Media. Before joining The New School, she was an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Christine was also an A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for the Humanities and the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her PhD in African American Studies at Northwestern University. The dominant question of Christine's research considers what avenues of thought new media opens for the study of race, whiteness, and coloniality. During the fellowship, Christine plans to complete her manuscript, Virtually White: The Crisis of Whiteness and Racial Rule in the Digital Age. In Virtually White, Christine offers a theory of whiteness, drawing from affect and postcolonial theory, to chart the rise of digitized performances of white supremacy across social media, from the memetic practices of the alt-right to the fetishization of frontier in tween tumblrs.

Ho Chak Law received a PhD in musicology from the University of Michigan in 2018. His recent articles could be found in journals such as TDR: The Drama Review (2021, 2023) and Music Theory Spectrum (2024) and edited volumes such as At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice (Indiana University Press, 2023) and Teaching Film from the People's Republic of China (Modern Language Association, 2024). He is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled Fading Decadence: Popular Music and the Politics of the Sinophone in the Late Twentieth Century, in which he explicates the ways popular music defied Sinocentric discourses by affective, expressive, translingual, and technological means during and after the Cold War.

Denise Lim is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming assistant professor of Black Visual and Material Cultures at Parson’s Art and Design History and Theory program. Denise has a BA in English and Sociology from Bryn Mawr College, an MA in African Studies, and a PhD in Sociology from Yale University. Previous to The New School, Denise was a Yale GSAS Alumni Fellow (2020-21) who taught a cross-listed course entitled, Space, Time, and the African City and served as a strategic initiatives fellow at the Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage where she implemented a COVID-19 impact study of African cultural heritage institutions. Later, Denise was a BIPOC curatorial postdoctoral fellow (2021-22) at Stanford University Archaeology Collections (SUAC) where she researched SUAC’s African Collections, taught two courses entitled The African Archive Beyond Colonization and Museum Cultures: Exhibiting the African Imaginary, and co-curated the exhibition, Reimagining African Borders Through Cultural Objects, featuring objects from Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and South Sudan. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Denise has co-authored a collaborative publication on the radical friendship between Japanese American activist, Yuri Kochiyama, and Black nationalist leader El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz or Malcolm X. This year, Denise plans to complete a monograph and digital project of her doctoral research on Ponte City, an infamous residential tower in Johannesburg that was originally constructed for wealthy white South Africans during the height of apartheid in 1975, but quickly devolved into stigmatized urban space for diverse communities of color. The monograph and digital project focus on themes of racist architectural design, the environmental racism of Ponte's geomorphology, and the xenophobia experienced by African foreign nationals living in post-apartheid South Africa.

Romy Opperman is originally from London, UK and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. Romy’s research centers on Africana, Indigenous, decolonial feminist thinkers to foreground issues of racism and colonialism for environmental and climate ethics and justice. Specifically, her work is concerned with the ontological politics and practices of freedom operative in Black feminist ecologies and geographies, and more generally in place-based movements and struggles over land and the environment. Additionally, it contributes to continental philosophy and critical theory by examining how Africana and decolonial philosophy repurpose aspects of the former traditions for their own ends. Romy’s work has appeared in Critical Philosophy of Race, March: A Journal of Art & Strategy, The Philosopher, and Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal and has forthcoming work in The New Centennial Review and Monthly Review. She is currently writing a book manuscript tentatively titled Groundings: Black Ecologies of Freedom. The book develops the concepts of racist environments and ecological freedom and asks how established topics within environmental and climate justice are transformed when considered from the radical philosophical traditions of the Black diaspora.

Brittnay L. Proctor received her PhD in African American Studies from Northwestern University and is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Media in the School of Media Studies at The New School. Her research interests include: Black Studies; black popular music, black feminist theory, sound studies, visual culture, and performance. Her work has been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, American Literature, Sounding Out!, Feminist Formations, Hyped on Melancholy, African American Review, Reviews in Digital Humanities, and ASAP/Journal. Her forthcoming book, Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden will be published with Bloomsbury Press: 33 1/3 Series, November 3, 2022. She is also working on a second book manuscript which draws on LP records and Compact Disc’s (CD’s), in order to trace the sonic and visual discourses of gender and sexuality in funk music in the United States post-1960.

Jonathan Michael Square joins ADHT as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor in Black Visual Culture. He has a PhD in history from New York University. Prior to joining Parsons full-time, he held a full-time appointment in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard University. His work has been published extensively in academic journals and the popular press, including Guernica, Vestoj, Small Axe, Hyperallergic, British Art Studies, International Journal of Fashion Studies, among others. A proponent in the power of social media as a platform for radical pedagogy, he founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom.

As a fellow, Square will continue working on his book manuscript Negro Cloth: How Slavery Birthed the Global Fashion Industry, which explores intersection between histories of enslavement and the fashion system.

Gabrielle Williams, PhD., is an African Americanist literary theorist that has recently worked at Rutgers University, and also at UC Berkeley. Gabrielle is beyond thrilled to be an Alumna of New School University, currently pursuing a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow/Assistant Professor in African American Literature position in the Department of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College. Originally hailing from the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles, CA, Gabrielle’s current career in academia was preceded by a long career as a Contemporary Modern dancer. Her artistry in dance was greatly bolstered by studies at the Los Angeles County High School of the Arts, as well as at The Ailey School. These studies led Gabrielle to spend several years in New York where she lived/worked as an artist before taking-up academic endeavors in both U.K. and U.S. institutions.

Presently, Gabrielle is mounting a Book Proposal entitled Starving from Satiety: Explorations of Uncommon Hunger in 20th Century African American Literature. Research in Starving from Satiety examines intersectional interplays between class, race, sex, food, and hunger depicted in novels by authors such Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor. Broadly, Starving from Satiety conjectures that various (Negro or black, slave, ex-slave, or disenfranchised) characters in novels under review are often rendered as experiencing detachment from ownership of their bodies, bellies, and physical hungers. In this way, Starving from Satiety analyzes renderings of metaphysical hunger, or, said differently, uncommon hunger in works by noted authors. These analyses largely explore ways that authors under review subtextually signpost that their characters’ treat physical hungers in uncommon ways because the (grossly) uncommon conditions of their carceralized lives catalyze metaphysical hungers (e.g., for the nourishment of “foods” such as agency, or, social justice) that greatly exceed those of common, physical types.

David Bering-Porter is Assistant Professor of Culture and Media and core faculty in the Code as a Liberal Arts program at the Eugene Lang College of the Liberal Arts at The New School. Areas of research include film and media studies, digital culture, and the intersections of media, science, and technology. His current book project is a study of undead labor and the ways that race, labor, and value come together in the mediated body of the zombie and his articles have appeared in the journals such as Culture Machine, Critical Inquiry, Flow, MIRAJ, Post 45, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

This project develops a theory of “undead labor,” defined as the value extracted from life beyond its natural limits, through the story of the zombie as a signifier of racial capital and a shadow of modern capitalism more broadly. Taking the figure of the zombie as its central object, this project finds, at the heart of capital, a desire to push past the natural boundaries of life and to overcome the limits of injury and death into a condition of “undeadness,” which promises a new kind of body with a limitless potential for the extraction of value.

Benoit Challand is Associate Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. His work straddles Middle Eastern and European studies, with monographs on Palestinian civil society, European memory and comparative research on settler colonialism. At NSSR, he teaches a variety of graduate courses on global theory that engage with settler colonial, decolonial and Indigenous studies. In his Mellon project, titled “In Plain Site”, Challand addresses the absence of Indigenous and enslaved people's memory in New York City's built environment, with a focus on private edifices. By revisiting the history of the Montauk Club in Brooklyn, the project tackles the hubris of gendered settler colonial violence and reflects on the possibility of an alternative archive of past ecologies and social interactions. The project builds on M-R Trouillot’s invitation to generate alternative forms of historical knowledge and to assess how institutions of learning, past and present, contribute to shaping sites of erasure in the middle of our cities.

Jaskiran Dhillon is an anti-colonial scholar and organizer who grew up on Treaty Six Cree Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada. Her work spans the fields of settler colonialism, anthropology of the state, environmental justice, anti-racist feminism, colonial violence, political ecology, and youth studies. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, The Nation, Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Formations, Environment and Society, Social Texts, and Decolonization among other venues.  She is the author of Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention (2017) and co-editor of Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (2019). Her new book, Notes on Becoming a Comrade: Solidarity, Relationality, and Future Making is forthcoming in 2024. Jaskiran is an associate professor of global studies and anthropology at The New School and served as the founding president of The New School's AAUP Chapter. She is also building a radical, community bookstore in West Philadelphia.

Jaskiran's current research focuses on the militarization and securitization of the northern Arctic border in the settler colony of Canada under conditions of climate change and environmental devastation. 

tarah douglas a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in photography, sound, and video. Her practice is rooted in the allegorical dissection of identity, color, language, landscape, and the human condition. douglas' research centers on collecting and dissecting Black folklore, symbology, and archival images while tracing Black migration patterns and the remnants of contact languages through the United States. She holds a BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including White Cube’s Tomorrow 2021, Marlborough Gallery, Casemore/Kirkeby, Harlem School of the Arts, Studio Museum of Harlem, the Gallatin at New York University, Project for Empty Space, Newark Arts Festival, and Winter Street Gallery.

An anthropologist, writer and artist, Abou Farman is author of On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience (2020, Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press) and Clerks of the Passage (2012, Montreal: Linda Leith Press). He is Associate Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and founder of Art Space Sanctuary as well as the Shipibo Conibo Center of NY.

Fluid Autonomy: Shipibo Konibo Politics in the Peruvian Amazon in the Era of Climate Change

Over the last decade and a half, the colonial and post-colonial arrangements of sovereignty in South America have been challenged by a resurgent indigeneity, challenging the entrenched centuries-old racism that had relegated indigenous populations to extinction – literally so in the exterminating policies of states, and figuratively so in the minds of scholars and leftist movements. My project, part research, part ongoing solidarity, tracks the development of Shipibo Konibo efforts at autonomy in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon where the waterways and rivers of the rainforest are the topography through which a fluid autonomy is being strategically reimagined and reclaimed, with activists, communities and organizations working towards flexible strategies for a viable future at a time when the future is most uncertain.

Daniel José Gaztambide Nuñez, PsyD, is assistant director of clinical training in the Department of Psychology, and director of the Frantz Fanon Lab for Intersectional Psychology. He is in psychoanalytic training at NYU Post-Doc, and author of the book A People's History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology. Daniel is also an active artist, and a member of the Puerto Rican poetry troupe, The Titere Poets.

Daniel is working on his second book, tentatively entitled A Psychotherapy for All: Clinical Theory & Technique for a World in Crisis. In it, he will draw on empirical research and decolonial psychoanalysis to articulate a novel theory of suffering under racial capitalism, and unpack its implications for therapeutic practice using rich clinical illustrations.

Sujatha Jesudason, Ph.D. is a Professor of Professional Practice in Management at The New School, where she teaches and practices in the areas of leadership, innovation, inclusion, and social movements. Before joining The New School in 2017, she worked as an organizer, facilitator, and executive director for over 30 years in various social justice movements. A serial entrepreneur in the social sector, Sujatha was the founder and Executive Director of CoreAlign, a reproductive justice organization teaching innovation for social change to frontline activists, and Generations Ahead, a social justice organization addressing ethical concerns related to developing genetic technologies. At The New School, Sujatha founded the Social Movements + Innovation Lab to create space for designing contentious new social movement strategies while centering issues of race and power in the innovation process. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and her undergraduate degree in Economics and Latin American Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

For the Mellow Fellowship, Sujatha will research and write a book, Speaking Race to Power: Practices for Confronting Racism in Our Everyday Lives, where she offers alternatives to ‘calling out’ and ‘cancel culture’ through skill-building for courageous conversations.

Jack Jin Gary Lee is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. His scholarship explores how race and law shape the social logics and processes of governance in modern empires and (post)colonial states. He is interested in "direct rule" with a focus on the racialized workings of law and legalities in the regulation of social bodies. To this end, Gary is working on a book that examines the significance of law and race in the development of Crown Colony government in the modern British Empire. Examining the reconstitution of Jamaica and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca) as Crown Colonies over the second half of the nineteenth century and after, this project examines the structures, practices, and legacies of “direct rule” in relation to “plural societies.”

Mev Luna is a research-based artist whose practice spans performance, installation, video, new media, and text. Through an autoethnographic/anti-ethnographic methodology, their work reappraises history to identify fictions governing contemporary life, and considers issues of institutional access, incarceration, and how images of marginalized groups are circulated and controlled. Recent exhibitions include the solo exhibition, Warped Terrain, at LaNao Galería in Mexico City, and the group show Empathy Fatigue at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago. Luna’s time-based works have premiered at SFMOMA (San Francisco, CA), Artists' Television Access (San Francisco, CA), The Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago, IL), and Kino Moviemento (Berlin, Germany). They've given talks at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, Bard College, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Luna was a 2020-2021 Queer | Art NYC Film Fellow; 2018 Art Matters Foundation Fellowship recipient; 2018-2019 BOLT resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition; 2017 SOMA Summer participant in Mexico City; and a 2015–2016 Research Fellow at the Shapiro Center for Research and Collaboration. They received an MFA in Performance from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Textiles and Media Arts from California College of the Arts.

Currently, Luna is working on Confined Terrain, an experimental documentary which examines the Texas prison system’s complex relationship with Mexican labor and the U.S. agricultural industry through the lens of one individual: their late father. Accounting for the subjective, embodied experience, and trauma informed perspective, Confined Terrain approaches legacies of systemic forms of oppression not as abstract systems but as part of an intimate history. The film aims to address issues that define our time, namely the injustices of the Prison Industrial Complex and anti-immigrant policies and sentiments in the United States.

Neyda Martinez is a producer, strategist, writer, and a long-time cultural worker who explores the role of art in public life while centering social justice and cultural equity. Selected in 2023 as a Sundance Woman to Watch x Adobe Fellow, and a Faculty Fellow for the Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence, her current documentaries in production include The People vs. Austerity, Bartolo, and A Chasm in Chinatown. Presently, Neyda is an Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies, Director of the Media Management Graduate Program, and Co-Director of the Impact Entrepreneurship Initiative at The New School.  As part of the Mellon Faculty Cohort, Neyda’s research is entitled Nosotros Somos El Museo del Barrio / We Are El Museo del Barrio, a people’s East Harlem community history and accompanying experimental short film that will draw on extensive research and oral histories to explore the origin story of what is regarded today as one of the leading Puerto Rican and Latine arts institutions in the nation.

Tara Menon focuses, in her research and teaching, on problems of religion, experience, and secularization in the European and Indian traditions. She has held fellowships at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Margaret Rhee is a poet, scholar and new media artist. Rhee’s debut poetry collection, “Love, Robot,” was published in 2017 and awarded a 2018 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association. Forthcoming books include monograph Machine Dreams: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body, and lyrical poetry collection Poetry Machines: Letters to Future Readers both under contract with Duke University Press and The Watermelon Woman under the Queer Film Classics series under contract with McGil University Press. Her current project includes a multi-site installation project "Afro-Asian Poetic Pantry of Solidarities'' which draws from models of mutual aid to resist anti-Black and anti-Asian violence in New York City. This installation will be installed at the MoCADA Abolition House on Govenor's Island. For her fellowship, she is beginning research on a corresponding monograph on Afro-Asian Poetics and comparative racialization in the cultural sphere.

Chat Travieso is an artist and designer, as well as co-founder of the multidisciplinary collaborative practice Yeju & Chat. Travieso’s research has been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts. His writing has been featured in Urban Omnibus, Places Journal, and MAS Context. Honors include the Columbia GSAPP Antiracism Curriculum Award, NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures/Design, and United States Artist Fellowship in Architecture & Design. He is a part-time lecturer at Parsons School of Design in the Integrated Design Program and an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia GSAPP. He holds a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an M.Arch from the Yale School of Architecture. For the Mellon Initiative Faculty Fellowship, Travieso will expand on his ongoing research project A Nation of Walls, which catalogues the remnants and political legacies of physical race barriers throughout the United States.

Kelly Walters is a designer, educator and founder of the multidisciplinary design studio Bright Polka Dot. In her ongoing design research, she interrogates the complexities of identity formation, systems of value, and shared vernacular in and around Black visual culture. She is the author of Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators: Conversations on Design and Race (Princeton Architectural Press, 2021) and co-author of The Black Experience in Design (forthcoming Skyhorse Publishing/Allworth Press, February 2022). Kelly is currently an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the BFA Communication Design Program at Parsons School of Design at The New School.

Mia Charlene White is originally from Queens, is a mother of two, lives with disability, and identifies as a Black woman of African American and Korean descent.  At the New School, Mia is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies in the Schools for Public Engagement, with a joint teaching appointment at the Milano School for Policy, Management and Environment.  Mia teaches courses on race, environment and geography such as the Land Lab; Black Geographies; Race, Environmental History & Natural Resource Management; and, the Revolution will be Cooperative -- Community Land Trusts, Coops and the Commune.  She is currently working on her first book, an ethnographic, archival, and oral-history based exploration of cooperative spatial justice practices in US communities of color, and she recently published “A Note on Reparative Planning”, in “Repair and Healing in Planning”, edited by Courtney Knapp, Jocelyn Poe & John Forester, Planning Theory and Practice.  Mia is Associate Director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center, Associate Director of the Housing Justice Lab at Parsons, and Faculty Affiliate of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy.

Tania Aparicio is a PhD candidate in Sociology at The New School for Social Research. Using ethnographic and archival methods, her research has focused on the study of cultural production, cultural organizations, and cultural workers, with particular attention to the dynamics of art worlds. In her dissertation she is writing about how film curatorship is produced and what effects the process brings about in terms of working conditions and diversity in cultural production. During her term as a fellow, she will examine how racialized categories enter the curatorial process and are applied situationally to artworks, artists, curatorial workers, audiences, tastes, and infrastructure. She will analyze how these situational uses of racial diversity are tied to the institutional missions of arts organizations, and, in turn, to performance markers of success.

Francisco Gonzalez Camelo is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at The New School for Social Research. His work explores questions of colonialism, citizenship, democracy, violence, and decolonization. In his dissertation “Decolonial Citizenship and the Making of the Democratic State,” he examines the practice of citizenship “from below” in Colombia from 1958 to the present. His work draws on global sociology engaging decolonial studies, political sociology, and indigeneity. As a Mellon Fellow, Francisco will focus on the last sections of his dissertation, the synchronic analysis of the last decade, by placing particular emphasis on how race and Indigeneity underpin current state violence against Colombian citizens. 

Sarah Chant is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. Their research explores the affective strategies of queer and trans people in the American South, particularly Alabama, in efforts to claim history and belonging in the region, through looking at queer mutual aid groups, archivists, clergy, and artists. As a Mellon fellow, Sarah will be working on finishing her dissertation, examining how the production of queer space and political possibilities in Alabama through practices of affect and memory intersect with broader landscapes and histories of race, class, gender, and colonialism in the South.

Feng Chen, Ph.D candidate at the Department of Sociology, The New School for Social Research, focuses on race and ethnicity, art and culture, and social media. Her study examines how a group of Chinese visual artists in New York perform and remake their Asian identity on social media in response to a surge in hatred towards and violence against Asians in the United States following the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. Her recent publication "Performing race and remaking identity: Chinese visual artists in New York during the COVID-19 pandemic" can be found in Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art  (Volume 9 Numbers 1 & 2).

Jiyoung Cho is a Ph.D. candidate in Politics at the New School for Social Research. Her main areas of research are global politics and international relations, with particular attention to the intersections of borders, mobility, political economy, political ecology, and politics of knowledge. Under the umbrella of Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence, she will complete her dissertation, Multiple Nations in the Promise of Peaceful Prosperity: Politics of Infrastructure in the Tumen River tri-borderlands and beyond. Her dissertation asks who or what is selected or imagined to be moving across certain places in infrastructure projects and who or what is selected to be immobile and why. Drawing from ethnographic research in borders of China, North and South Korea and diverse institutions that have produced particular forms of knowledge to inform such decisions about mobility and immobility in relation to infrastructure projects, it defamiliarizes and challenges certain boundaries and categorizations of nature, races, ethnicities and specific forms of scientific and geopolitical knowledge embedded in the peaceful and prosperous scenarios anticipated in and through infrastructure projects.

Monise Valente da Silva is a Ph.D. candidate in Public and Urban Policy at The New School for Public Engagement. During her term as a Mellon fellow Monise will be completing her dissertation, a transdisciplinary ethnographical project which investigates the co-constituted and disputed relationship between bodies, policies, and space. Titled "Faith in the Fight and a Foot on the Ground", her research draws conceptual references from feminist scholarship, performance studies, urban policy, and design to discuss the emancipatory potential of embodied and material tactics of resistance implemented by housing rights movements in southern Brazil.

Edlyane Medina Escobar is a Mellon Initiative Dissertation Fellow and a doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology at The New School for Social Research. Originally from Moca, Puerto Rico, she completed a BA in psychology and women and gender studies at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. She migrated to the United States and completed her MA in general psychology before continuing her doctoral studies in the same institution. Her proposed research explores colonial mentality and colorism within the family unit and its connection to mental health outcomes in Puerto Rican populations.

P.J. Gorre is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research that specializes in Phenomenology & Existentialism, the History & Philosophy of Race, and the History & Philosophy of Science. He has been a teaching fellow at Parsons, Eugene Lang, and the University Lecture program; receiving an NSSR Outstanding Teaching Award in 2016. He is also an Adjunct Instructor at Pratt Institute. As part of the Mellon Initiative, P.J.'s research interrogates the Eurocentric legacy of philosophy conventionally understood, drawing influence from the critical work of Frantz Fanon and Jan Patočka on the possibility of philosophy "after Europe." In this respect, his work is in communication with contemporary comparative and global perspectives in philosophical scholarship.

Bettine Josties is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the New School for Social Research. Her dissertation explores the practice of producing TikTok dance content from an ethnographic and political economy perspective. It shows how TikTok, as a socio-technical environment and for-profit entertainment platform, mobilizes bodies and solicits their movements to participate in the economy of TikTok dances and how different TikTok users who create dance content relate to, inhabit, navigate, and creatively make use of the platform.

Aysegul Kayagil is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at The New School for Social Research. Her research pertains to race, ethnicity, Turkish nationalism, qualitative methodologies, and legacy of slavery in the Middle East. In her dissertation project she examines how the newly emerging Afro-Turk identity stands in the broader topography of identities in Turkey. Drawing on archival material, participant observation, and in-depth interviews within the Afro-Turk community, she explores the role of race as an integral yet subtle element in the making of Turkishness as the dominant ethno-national identity. During her term as a fellow, she will explore the simultaneous existence and denial of slavery within the Ottoman Empire and of a racialized history in modern Turkey.

Mariam Matar is an Egyptian/British Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. Her research areas include critical theory, decolonial theory, feminist theory, and abolitionism. Most recently, she has been working on conceptualizing mass dehumanization as a form of social death in relation to refugee camps and prisons. In addition to her academic work, Mariam is involved in varying community organizations such as the South Brooklyn Mutual Aid group, Community Help in Park Slope and Art and Resistance through Education. Her non academic interests include embroidery, naturalism and writing fiction.

Dion’s research focuses on the role of work by incarcerated people within US carceral political economy, and on in-prison social movements. Prison work is a site of contradiction, at once a source of labor which enables the prison's maintenance and reproduction, while also being cast as a potential site of emancipation, through its withholding and movement-led re-articulation. Dion’s dissertation explores these issues through a focus on the US national prison strikes of 2016 and 2018. His analysis draws on extensive interviews with incarcerated people about the work they do, and with the incarcerated leadership of the in-prison social movements who organized and called the national strikes, as well as with those who supported them on the outside.

A Haitian-born, French Afrofeminist organizer and writer. She is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at The New School for Social Research. Her dissertation “Noir in Place: Spatializing Black Politics in contemporary France” investigates the political spaces (spatial and ideological) of Black political movements in France, with an interest in forms of conflict and adaptation vis-à-vis France's universalist ideology, legacies of slavery/colonialism, and policing. Fania Noel is the co-founder and editorial director of the French political journal led by women, queer and trans people of color,  Revue AssiégéEs (Besieged), and the Haitian feminist anthology revue Alaso. Until 2021 she was in charge of the political ideology and training of the MWASI – Collectif Afroféministe (France). She recently published her second book (March 2022), Et Maintenant le pouvoir. Un horizon politique Afroféministe [Power now. An Afrofeminist Political Horizon] (Editions Cambourakis) and serves as a member of  Black Feminist Future‘s Board of Directors. vudelabas.com. 

Veronica is a PhD candidate at the Milano School of Management, Policy and the Environment and at the Urban Systems Lab. Before joining the New School, she was a teacher and consultant at the Institute for Housing and Urban Studie (IHS) at Erasmus University in Rotterdam (The Netherlands). She was born in the north-west of Italy from Italo-Scottish parents.

Her current research investigates how concerns for social justice manifests and is negotiated in the frontline community of Edgemere (Rockaway, NYC) where various climate adaptation strategies – from retreat to risk reduction - are being proposed to mitigate the effects of climate change induced sea level rise and storm surges.

Bart Orr is a PhD candidate in Public and Urban Policy at the New School.  His dissertation focuses on climate change and the politics of planning and designing resilient urban futures. Using San Juan, Puerto Rico, as a case study, his research investigates the social relations around the design and functionality of resilient community solar micro-grids. As a Mellon Initiative Fellow, his work will explore how the concept of resilience is reconfiguring colonial logics and governance in Puerto Rico, and in particular how the turn to resilience can be understood within the larger colonial history of the construction of Puerto Ricans as racialized subjects in need of intervention.

Udeepta studies political sociology and his overall interests revolve around democratic theory and practice. His dissertation focuses on how democratic assemblies contest authoritarian populist constructions of 'people,' especially during the reign of Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government in India. As a Mellon Initiative fellow, he will  study the 3 month long assembly at the heart of a muslim working class neighborhood, Shaheen Bagh, in Delhi led mostly by racialized muslim women against the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The CAA provides a path to citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from neighboring countries while excluding Muslims from this provision. The law was understood by the women in the assembly as undermining the secular ethos of the Indian constitution, but more crucially an attack on their religious identity and membership in the Indian polity by Hindu nationalism. Udeepta will examine how the law and the Shaheen Bagh assembly--of racialized and gendered subjects--articulate, contest and subvert conceptions of national peoplehood.

Miranda is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She specializes in Feminist Philosophy, Critical Race Theory and Narrative Identity Theory. She has worked as a Teaching Fellow at Eugene Lang and taught summer classes at the Legal Outreach Organization. Her research is primarily concerned with the role of storytelling in political movements, and their effects on shifting public consciousness or influencing strategies of resistance. Specifically, she studies the US feminist movement against sexual and gender violence. Her work intersects with critiques of a feminist use of the coercive power of the state- known commonly as carceral feminism. One of her views is that narratives' role in politics and the way it shapes ourselves and others is partially how we will address reactionary or conservative politics that pose as liberatory.

Lee Jiménez is a cross pollinating visual storyteller, teacher, and student from NYC (Lenapehoking) by way of Borikén. Their background in community organizing and lived experiences as a queer nonbinary femme of color are integral to their work; activating audiences to become participants in problem solving towards collective liberation and interrogating our relationship to pleasure, intimacy, and one another.

As a Community Fellow, they will use storytelling as the foundation for ¿Y Tu Agüela, A'onde Ejtá? (And Your Grandmother, Where She At?); an audiovisual narrative series of interviews and photographs of various community organizers, families, collectives, scholars, and cultural workers from the Boricua diaspora and those who've and continue to work closely with Boricuas in New York. This audiovisual narrative series will be made accessible online as an ongoing living archive and explore topics of identity, migration, anti-Blackness and racial dynamics, and uplift narratives of Boricua resistance and solidarity with other working class communities against colonial regimes.

Milton X. Trujillo is an undocumented chronically ill artist and community worker, who migrated 22 years ago from Quito, Ecuador, as a result of displacement, was raised in Corona and Jackson Heights, and now survives here to create, organize and dream big dreams of radical collective autonomy and solidarity in his neighborhood and communities of Corona, Queens. His main artistic practice is filmmaking, which he engages as a way to make peace with migration, pain, and class, especially as it relates to documenting and engaging collective processes in his community in diaspora. His community work as well as cultural work is to engage local community members with the intention to first and foremost fight isolation and alienation, as well as creating and sustaining spaces that welcome intimacy, popular, political and alternative educational models for reflection and action. The hope is that through this practice he can process intimacies with place, memory and imagined temporal landscapes as they are intersected by histories of racial capitalism and its harms. This thinking-through is part of a grounding to return us to right relationship with land and our non-human relations, as well as each other, towards a subjectivity that does not center the extractive gaze of whiteness.

His proposed research project is to think through experiments on memory work and cultural work he’s done in community, study them and other histories as forms of base and subjectivity building, and create curriculum for cultural organizing through filmmaking that centers collective investigations with sound and listening for image making as contrasted to traditional film production and storytelling forms.

Kei Williams is a BLACK queer transmasculine visual artist and community organizer. Born and raised in Upstate New York and a founding member of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, they have helped build some of the most powerful movements of our time. As a part of Movement Netlab, a practice-centered ‘think-make-and-do tank’, they worked to develop conceptual and practical tools based on decentralization as a framework for organizers, activists, and researchers in order to bring us closer to a society of beloved community. A lifelong responder to injustice (the grandchild of labor activists), Kei is an abolitionist organizer whose work has spanned across issues such as racial and gender violence to mass incarceration and jail building to climate jobs and justice with their aim being to transform culture from the individual into a global systemic analysis of structural oppression through the lens of intersectionality.

Kei currently lives in Queens, NY with his dog Spartacus and 12 inherited plants. They are a firm believer in the Oxford comma.

Conceptually titled “Movements Move, Activists Activate”, Kei’s proposed research project is to reflect on their work as a BLACK transgender activist and develop living intellectual and creative bodies of work including a curriculum on decentralization with/in social movements, mapping the strategies of abolition, and analyzing the dissonance that exists between our concepts of safety and home. Kei will utilize graphic design, walking tours, and community engagement to actualize this project.

DeeArah is a Southern-born artist, mover, writer, and mama. She facilitates adventurous, transformative experiments in learning and collaboration steeped in reverence for relationships and everyday magic. DeeArah's creative and community practices include an array of modalities, including listening, radical archive, strategic visioning, experimentation, and dance.

DeeArah partners with kindred beings in New York City, Hudson Valley, and beyond to move forward learning and action around Black joy and liberation, cooperative lifeways, land and food sovereignty, Home and housing for all, and solidarity economy. DeeArah is a Cooperative Developer and Project Steward of Co-op Hudson Valley--a local fund and member organization of Seed Commons Community Wealth Cooperative. Co-op HV partners with workers to start, grow, and sustain cooperative enterprises and to build collective economic power and a thriving regional solidarity economy that centers equity and justice. DeeArah is an alum Community Fellow of the Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence at The New School, where she co-teaches The Revolution Will Be Cooperative with Mia Charlene White and serves as a co-steward of The Re|Organizing School. 

Rooted in the Northeast for decades, DeeArah has partnered with place-based organizations and projects like The Field, The Laundromat Project, Urban Bush Women, Rites of Passage Project, and Naturally-Occurring Cultural Districts of New York to support artists’ development and community-engagement initiatives. She also served as Community Liaison and OJBK Radio's Community Dialogue Host for Creative Time’s and Weeksville Heritage Center’s funkgodjazz&medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn. As a collaborative leader and community steward, DeeArah was Founder and Director of Gather Brooklyn and co-stewarded Freebrook Spaces—a cultural commons in Bedford Stuyvesant. She was a Co-Founder and worker-owner of Mumbet's Freedom Farm, and she served as Co-Director of JACK and Director of Education of Brooklyn Children's Museum.

DeeArah currently resides on Wappinger and Munsee Lenape land [Poughkeepsie, NY], where she nurtures her connections to people and places.

Chandler Louden is a master’s candidate at Parsons School of Design and he is in the Design and Urban Ecologies MS. He earned a BA degree in Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Chandler has developed an interest in community planning with a focus on assisting in the creation of new forms of infrastructure. This includes working to make New York City more food secure through research through coworking with community gardens. He also has an interest in building a sustainable economy based on regionally available materials and circularity. Chandler has experience in a wide variety of fields related to public engagement, design and history. He has interned at the NYC Department of City of Planning. He also works as a Garden Educator at the New York Botanical Garden. His research uses the lens of regional planning, urban metabolism, and participatory design. His current research project is focused on the relationship between climate mitigation infrastructure and capitalism.

Drake is a nomadic urbanist with a background in grassroots housing advocacy. He received his B.S. at Towson University (‘15), in Baltimore Maryland. After college, he developed an interest in social anthropology and redlining in racially segregated cities. Since then he has lived in San Francisco where he worked in housing development and obtained a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from UC Berkeley (‘19). Currently, Drake is working toward his Master of Science in Design and Urban Ecologies. His recent research examines the intersection of evolving capitalist constructs and mass surveillance of marginalized communities. Influenced by W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, and Simone Browne, he investigates the development of digital feudalism. His mission is to visualize how these complex systems manifest in our daily lives. He is currently interested in researching housing surveillance and developing an anti-surveillance campaign through which he envisions Black people to be seen and not watched.

Constance L. Smith is a second year Master of Science candidate in Environmental Policy and a first year joint Tishman Environment and Design Center/Mellon Initiative for Faculty Excellence Fellow. Their background is in critical theory and environmental science. They also have a minor in Brazilian Portuguese. Constance’s research involves combining environmental science with decolonial theories, marginalized feminist theories, queer theories of mourning and melancholia, Black radical ecology and geography, Indigenous place-thought, memory studies, peripheral Marxist theories, and historical analysis, among others, to unravel the hauntings and horrors of colonialism and coloniality. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how enduring colonial mechanisms shape our relationship to the land and reproduce the economization and commodification of nature, forcing marginalized peoples to engage in extractive and destructive commodity markets.

As a Fellow, Constance will travel to Brazil to work with groups such as Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) who are part of a long tradition of resistance to (neo)colonialism in Brazil. While working with MST, she will examine the challenges, needs, and inspiration that comes from centering food and land sovereignty over economic growth. This will be the first phase of a long-term project that seeks to join the current decolonial knowledge-sharing dialogues and cross-collaboration efforts amongst Afro-diasporic, Latino/Latinx, and Indigenous activists, scholars, and organizers throughout the Americas. Constance hopes to center decolonial narratives of resistance as a means of creating new memories and ties to the land beyond the traumas of colonialism and chattel slavery, which she believes is necessary to
combat racial capitalism in the face of climate crises especially.