ASMA ABBAS is Associate Professor of Politics and Philosophy, and Emily H. Fisher Faculty Fellow, at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. She is director of Hic Rosa, an art, education, and politics collective, and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. A transdisciplinary political theorist interested in the history of forms of political existence, she thinks and works in between politics, aesthetics, poetics, and ethics, addressing how these domains and their demands shape the tasks of study and struggle, knowledge and subject production, in a global postcolonial and neo-fascist context. She cultivates a practice in decolonial and materialist politics and a commitment to de-provincialising marginalized ways of thinking, being, and knowing in order to channel their emancipatory potential. Her ongoing curiosities all find a home in a method of inquiry and avowal that conduces to its objects instead of commanding them.
THEODRA BANE is a Doctoral Candidate in Philosophy at Villanova University. She received her BA in Philosophy and French from the University of Dayton, and her MA in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research. Her thinking centers around decolonial theory, heterodox Marxisms, intersectional feminisms, the Black Radical Tradition, and philosophies of social justice. Current work investigates contemporary issues of social justice, with particular attention to the ideological mechanisms lending harmful hegemonies continued force, and the necessarily collaborative revolutionary efforts toward liberation.
EMILY BEAUSOLEIL is Lecturer of Politics at Massey University and Associate Editor of Democratic Theory Journal. She received her PhD in Political Science (specializations in Political Theory and Comparative Politics) from the University of British Columbia. Her studies include questions of the embodied dimensions of perception, response, and relation; performance (especially dance and theatre) as sites and modes of democratic engagement across profound social difference; and collaborations between performance, therapy, conflict mediation, and education to inform creative democratic process design to cultivate conditions for receptivity. Current work takes up this interdisciplinary tradition of democratic receptivity and listening with particular attention to conditions of socioeconomic inequality in Aotearoa New Zealand.
DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVA is Associate Professor and Director of The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications and art collaborations operate at the thresholds of critical racial and ethnic studies, feminist theory, critical legal theory, political theory, moral philosophy, postcolonial studies, and latin american & caribbean studies.
ZAK BRECKENRIDGE is a writer and independent scholar finishing up a year-long Fulbright teaching appointment in Austria. He graduated with his BA from Bard College at Simon’s Rock before earning his MA in the University of Chicago Program in Humanities. He is entering the Environmental Humanities MA program at the University of Utah this fall. His current thinking has revolved around American essays, travel writing, and nature writing; assemblage theory and new materialism; colonialism and post-colonial thought; American social, economic, and environmental history; and African-American and Native-American literature.
ELIZABETH DAVIS Elizabeth Davis is a PhD student in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. She received her BA in Political Studies from Bard College at Simon’s Rock and her MA in Political Theory & Gender and Women’s Studies from McGill University. Elizabeth’s interdisciplinary research draws on feminist theory, visual culture & media studies, disability studies, and studies of race, capitalism, and (de)coloniality to think about the politics of aesthetics, affect, and embodied experience.
COLIN EUBANK is a PhD student in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, with emphases in Political Theory and Law & Politics. He received his BA in Political Studies (Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics) and Anthropology from Bard College at Simon’s Rock. His thinking is informed by questions emerging from experiments with the haptic and sensory in a politics of the everyday. These concerns span racialized technologies of terror and surveillance, histories of insurance, risk, and speculation in global racial capitalism, the aesthetics of militarized humanitarianism. A current iteration of this work focuses on the movements of and in thought which bring together contrapuntal relations between fugitivity and refuge on the thresholds of the ‘grounds’ of law.
AVONLEA FISHER just received their BA in Political Studies and Social Action/Social Change at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. Their BA thesis constructs a politics of harm reduction that ecnompasses both decriminalization and supportive structures/programs for people impacted by the sex and drug trades. Avonlea’s studies are informed and complicated by work in liberation movements; postcolonial theory; legal and political constructions of criminality; critical race theory; and critical feminist theory.
CIARAN FINLAYSON is a graduate student at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London. He also works, teaches, and performs with the London-based art collective sorryyoufeeluncomfortable and presents with Black Study Group (London). He received his BA in Art History, African-American Studies, and Contemporary Critical Theory from Bard College at Simon’s Rock. His current work moves around Jen Romanticism, Black Studies, ‘outsider art’ & autonomy, and philosophy of art after Adorno.
ARI FOGELSON is a graduate student in Ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin. He received his BA in Political Studies from Bard College at Simon’s Rock.
STEPHEN HAGER is a musician and filmmaker. He received his BA in the Arts from Bard College at Simon’s Rock.
SORA HAN is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law & Society and School of Law at the University of California, Irvine. Her affiliations span across African-American Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and the PhD program in Culture & Theory at Irvine. She received her PhD in History of Consciousness (parenthetical in Feminist Studies) from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her JD (concentration in Critical Race Studies) from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her thinking is animated by studies in law (as philosophy, doctrine, and political practice), poetics, black radicalism, histories of anti-colonial freedom struggle, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. One of her current projects works on an anti-colonial alphabet conceptualized as gestures of thought, paint, dance, film, body, lyric, sound, memory, rhythm, notation, language and abstraction.
ROSHANAK KHESHTI is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and affiliate faculty in the Critical Gender Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. She received her PhD in Anthropology with a designated emphasis in Women’s Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work explores the consumption of race, gender, and sexuality through sound and film, with current thought considering the racial history of aesthetics and the work of synesthesia as an outlawed and queer haunting of the aesthetic. She has also published numerous musical recordings both as a former member of Bay Area-based experimental rock band The Ebb and Flow and independently as composer and performer for independent film.
ISABELLA LEE just received her BA in Politics, Ethics, and Social Thought from Bard College Berlin. Her bachelor’s thesis took up a genealogy of the American Academy and the radical movements of students, teachers, and workers that have subverted and transformed it, with an emphasis on unnamable forces that drive those who are ‘the outsiders within’ these institutions. Traditions informing her studies include: materialism; decolonization; deconstruction; unorthodox critical theory; the feminine and the political; woman of color feminism; the black radical tradition; affect theory; alternative conceptions of the human; critiques of liberalism; theories of the nomadic/failed/subversive/non-interpolated subject and subjectivity; and theories of absence, silence, memory, haunting, imperceptibility, and the unrequited.
NANCY LOVE is Professor of Government & Justice Studies at Appalachian State University. She received her PhD in Political Science from Cornell University. Her work sits at the interstices of critical theory, democratic theory, feminist theory, politics and aesthetics, and music and politics. She is currently working on a project on “decolonizing citizenship and indigenous lifeways.”
ROSA MEDINA-DOMÉNECH is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Science Department, and a member of the Gender and Women Research Institute at the University of Granada (Spain). She earned her MD from the University of Granada, and trained as a medical specialist in Oncology-Radiotherapy at Valencia University Hospital. She is interested in the production of cultural knowledge on feelings beyond the margins defined by expertise. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Spanish contemporary emotional culture including medical, psychological and cultural discourses about emotions, subjectivity and sexual diversity during the Spanish sixties. Her current project pays attention to the emotional surface of the patient and doctor relationship during the Francoist regime, and more specifically on how fear plays a role in constructing gendered subjectivities through the cultural and material production of “paranoia”.
DRESDA MENDEZ has an MA in Gender and Women’s Studies, from Utrecht University, The Netherlands and Universidad de Granada, Spain. She also has an MA in North American Studies and a BBA in International Relations and Political Theory from Universidad de las Américas Puebla, México. She is a transdisciplinary academic enthusiast interested in the politics and geographies of the ordinary. Situated at the intersection of bodies, health/illness, and gender, my work addresses how these domains intersect with intimate and affective geographies of the daily life.
ALANA PAGANO (forthcoming)
TARA-LYNNE PIXLEY is a PhD student in Communication at the University of California, San Diego and Knight Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. She received her BS in Philosophy and Journalism from Florida A&M University, and her MFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design. As a scholar and theorist of visual media as well as a documentary photographer and filmmaker, Tara is interested in the role of visual representations of ‘the real,’ particularly as it intersects with discursively produced conceptions of the Other. Animating questions emerge at the intersections of film, TV and journalism studies, critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, indigenous critique, settler colonialism studies, visual culture, photojournalism, and documentary filmmaking.
ISAAC GABRIEL SALGADO is a PhD student in Political Theory and Comparative Politics at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his BA from Bard College at Simon’s Rock and an MA in Politics from the New School for Social Research. His thought is heavily informed by studies in race, indigeneity, Latin American politics, and philosophies of history and temporality, and early-modern Iberia. Within this vista, current work focuses on issues of melancholia, temporality, and race in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, attending to the visuality of race as a structuring force in everyday life.
ANA SCHWARTZ is a Doctoral Candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA in English from the University of California Berkeley, and her MA in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work is informed by questions at the interstices of affect theory, settler colonialism, history of literary genres, and political geography. Her dissertation develops a critical storytelling method to reveal a genealogy of emotional disciplines organizing affect in the (exemplary) settler colony of seventeenth-century Massachusetts as a way of forcefully structuring idealized forms of collective life and relation in the present, such as relationships of hosts, guests, neighbors, and friends. The endurance of the settler colonial affective disciplines forms the basis of future projects.
ALLEN STACK is an independent scholar. He received his PhD from the Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins University (Kreiger School), with emphases in International Relations and Political Theory. His interests focus on the aesthetics of space and political representations of space as performed through narration, a poetics of history, and material culture and artifacts. A current theme in his continuing project of the minor tradition of an ethico-poetic diplomatic meliorism grapples with questions of race and religion in Mediterranean history as an international space which is coded politically and diplomatically as an anti-Islamic and anti-African space.
REI TERADA is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Boston University, working on theory, history of philosophy, 19th- and 20th-century poetry, and romanticism. Some of her recent work has taken up iterations of romantic and post-romantic thought after Kant to explore images of freedom that emerge in excess of a world policed by canonical epistemologies and aesthetics.
ELIZABETH WALZ is a PhD student in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Michigan. She received BAs in Spanish Linguistics and Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies, and an MA in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also earned a Certificate in Specialized Catalan Studies and Literary Translation through the Institut Ramon Llull. Her work is committed to contributing to multilingual spaces and to building intellectual, legal, and political bridges between communities. Elizabeth’s work engages community organizing and advocacy, translation and interpretation, and multilingual teaching, with questions and problems animated by topics in autonomy, violence & temporality, contemporary feminist political theory, language politics, and Catalan & Basque cultural production.
MILO WARD is a graduate student in Political Science at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. He received his BA in Political Studies (Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics) from Bard College at Simon’s Rock. His studies are informed by works and questions in political economy and the migration of politics; political methodology and the politics and ethics of method; the aesthetic politics of legibility of violence and its subjects; and literature/film. A current project studies moments of intersection between colonial law, liberal contractarianism, and juridical emergencies to regard how temporal urgencies in liberalism are woven through anxieties surrounding (neo)colonial, (neo)imperial, and (neo)liberal drives toward representation and domination. His inquiry is devoted to reaching the intimate material relations and responsibilities that are disappeared through violent imperatives to categorical clarity and vision.
KYLE WANBERG is Clinical Assistant Professor in Global Liberal Studies with affiliations in Global Cultures, Arts and Literatures, and Cultural Foundations at New York University. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine. His research clusters to include anti-colonial literature, global aesthetics, comparative indigenous literatures, orature, literary theories of authority, and translation studies. A current project explores literary representations of the changing financial instruments key to the development of contemporary global capitalism, with particular attention to the intersections of politics and aesthetics internationally.