Dr. Bimbola Akinbola is an artist and scholar currently based in Chicago. Working at the intersection of African diapora studies, performance, and visual art, her scholarly and artistic work is concerned with the complicated and nagging nature of belonging, queerness, and the concept of family.

Dr. Akinbola's newly published book, Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women's Art examines anti-respectability, queer kinship, and diasporic homemaking in the creative work of contemporary Nigerian diasporic women artists. Her essays have also been published in Text and Performance Quarterly and Women Studies Quarterly.

Dr. drea brown is a queer Black feminist poet-scholar whose writing has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Stand Our Ground: Poems for Marissa Alexander and Trayvon Martin, the Smithsonian Magazine, Southern Indiana Review, Bellingham Review and About Place Journal. drea is the author of dear girl: a reckoning, winner of the Gold Line Press 2014 chapbook prize, and co-editor of Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature (U Pittsburgh 2021).

In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph Conjuring the Haint: The Haunting Poetics of Black Women where she argues that for Black women, haunting is both a condition and a strategy in lived experiences and literary productions.

Dr. Atiya Husain is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and a faculty affiliate in Anthropology/Sociology at Williams College. Her work has been published in scholarly journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, as well as popular outlets including Boston Review, Slate, and Adi Magazine. She is a founding co-editor of the University of Toronto Press series “Dimensions: Islam, Muslims, and Critical Thought,” a founding board member of Communication and Race, and has also served as Associate Editor of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. She has a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor.

In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism, where she traces the origins and logics of the FBI wanted poster and argues how this logic continues to structure wanted posters, as well as much contemporary social scientific thinking about race.