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.

Dr. Celina de Sá is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally from the SF Bay Area, she received her PhD with distinction at the University of Pennsylvania in Africana Studies and Anthropology. Outside of her professional life, she is also a capoeirista and training to be a flamenco dancer.

In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph Diaspora Without Displacement: The Coloniality and Promise of Capoeira in Senegal, (published by Duke University Press July 2025) where she analyzes a capoeira network across West Africa, de Sá shows how urban West Africans use capoeira to explore the relationship between Blackness, diaspora, and African heritage.

Dr. Julia Elyachar is an author, anthropologist, and political economist. She was trained in anthropology, economics, history of political and economic thought, political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. At Princeton, she is an associate professor of anthropology, and associate professor at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She received her BA in Economics from Barnard College, Columbia University and her MA and PhD in Anthropology and Middle East Studies from Harvard University.

In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized. Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Dr. Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule.

Dr. Élika Ortega is assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Dr. Ortega writes about the intersection of digital and print publishing, digital literature, cultural hybridity, digital humanities, and multilingualism in academia. Her work on these topics has been published in venues like ASAP Journal, PMLA, Hispanic Review, Debates in the Digital Humanities, EBR, and others. She is currently one of the editors for the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 5.

Today we discuss Dr.Ortega’s monograph Binding Media. Hybrid Print-Digital Literature from across the Americas , published by Stanford University Press in March 2025, where she proposes the notion of “binding media” and provides us with an essential account of contemporary book history and highlights the way binding media help illuminate processes of cultural hybridization that have been instigated by the expediency of globalized digital technologies and transnational dynamics.

Dr. Margaret J. Wiener is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali (University of Chicago Press) won the 1995 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, awarded by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Her publications have been grounded in many years of field research on the island of Bali, Indonesia’s most famous province, as well as foraging in colonial archives and libraries in The Netherlands. She considers herself an empirical philosopher, who brings an ethnographic sensibility to the clashes involved in colonial encounters while asking broad questions about practices of knowing and making worlds. Inspirations from thinkers in the interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society (STS) inform her recent book Magic’s Translations: Reality Politics in Colonial Indonesia (Duke University Press, 2025), the topic of today’s conversation. Dr. Wiener examines how the category of magic traveled from Europe through the imposition of colonial rule and the birth of anthropology.

Her current research extends her longstanding interest in the worlds different practices produce to multispecies entanglements and conflicting visions of the future.

Dr. Mary Poole is a historian of U.S. and African history, with an emphasis on histories of social movements, racial capitalism, colonialism, feminist and other critical social theory, and Indigenous decolonizing research methods. She has served on the faculty of Prescott College in Arizona since 2003. In the 1980s, she served as a fiscal analyst for the Washington State Senate Ways & Means Committee overseeing welfare policy during a period of federal dismantling of the U.S welfare state and rapid prison expansion and the corresponding increase in racially discriminatory drug laws. She later served as Executive Director for Early Options for Unintended Pregnancy, a non-governmental organization established to teach family practice doctors techniques of early abortion.

She earned her PhD at Rutgers, which led to her first book, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (UNC: 2006) which demonstrates how the U.S. welfare state operates as a mechanism of racial capitalism, producing economic security as a property of whiteness. She has worked closely for over two decades with Meitamei Olol Dapash on land rights, environmental justice and decolonizing research, and has co-directed through that time the Institute for Maasai Education, Research & Conservation (MERC) and the Dopoi Center. In today’s conversation, we discuss Decolonizing Maasai History: A Path to Indigenous African Futures, (Zed Books/Bloomsbury, 2025), co-authored with Meitamei Olol Dapash, where they offer a new version of Maasai history based on Maasai memory and concerns.

Meitamei Olol-Dapash is the founder and Executive Director of the Maasai Environmental Resource Coalition (MERC) a registered community-based organization in Kenya. MERC is a network of grassroots organizations and activists promoting the rights of the Maasai community and the environment.

Dr. Wendell Marsh is an Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy at Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco. His work bridges Global Black Studies, African Studies, and Islamic Studies, with a focus on how African and diasporic intellectual traditions and expressive cultures reshape our understanding of knowledge, religion, and the humanities.

In today’s conversation, we discuss his latest monograph, Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities, (Columbia University Press, 2025), where he recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa.

Dr.José Miguel Palacios is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach. His work explores the relations between transnational histories of radical cinemas and questions of migration, solidarity, networks of cinematic exchange, and archival practices He has published in journals like Film Quarterly, Screen, The Moving Image, Jump Cut, and [in] Transition. In today’s conversation, we discuss his book, Transnational Cinema Solidarity: Chilean Exile Film & Video after 1973 (UC Press, 2025) where he offers a politicized understanding of world and transnational cinema that emphasizes geopolitical relations and cinematic alliances based on solidarity.

He is currently working on a second book devoted to the archives of exile filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, which was awarded a Project Development Grant by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in 2025.