Plenary Speakers

Dasha Kelly Hamilton is a writer, performer, facilitator, and creative change agent who seeks to amplify community connections by facilitating discussions about topics that often divide communities, topics like race and class. Hamilton is Milwaukee’s Poet Laureate and was named Artist of the Year by the City of Milwaukee. She has released four spoken-word recordings, written two novels, and appeared in HBO presents Russell Simmon’s Def Poetry Jam. In 2012, she was named the Pfister Narrator and shared the stories of the hotel’s visitors and guests on its blog. She also founded Still Waters Collective, a network for storytellers and language enthusiasts. Kelly was the first American artist-in-residence invited to Lebanon’s Rafiki Hariri University for a partnership with the American University of Beirut. She has traveled as a U.S. Embassy Arts Envoy to Botswana and the Island of Maurirtius. The Soapbox Project

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L.A. Kauffman has been involved in grassroots movements, as a journalist, historian, organizer and strategist for more than thirty-five years. Kauffman was a central strategist for the campaign that saved more than 100 New York City community gardens from being demolished. During one city land auction they released 10,000 crickets—Kauffman’s own plan. She was the mobilizing coordinator for the antiwar protests of 2003 and 2004, some of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history. Her writings on organizing and social movement history have been published in The Guardian, The Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones, The Village Voice, n+1, The Baffler, and more. Currently, she is involved in a range of projects to oppose the Trump presidency.

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Juan De Lara is a geographer and an Associate Professor in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His book, Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Inland Southern California (UC Press, 2018), uses logistics and commodity chains to unpack the black box of globalization by showing how the scientific management of bodies, space, and time produced new labor regimes that facilitated a more complex and extended system of global production, distribution, and consumption. Professor De Lara’s research interests include social movements, urban political economy, Latinx geographies, logistics, immigration, and the racial politics of big data analytics.

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Brian Larkin is the Director of Graduate Studies and a Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the ethnography and history of media in Nigeria. Most broadly, he examines the introduction of media technologies into Nigeria—cinema, radio, digital media—and the religious, political, and cultural changes they bring about. He explores how media technologies comprise broader networked infrastructures that shape a whole range of actions from forms of political rule, to new urban spaces, to religious and cultural life. He has published widely on issues of technology and breakdown, piracy and intellectual property, the global circulation of cultural forms, infrastructure and urban space, sound studies, and Nigerian film (Nollywood). Larkin is co-founder of the Comparative Media Initiative at Columbia University and co-founder of the University Seminar on Media Theory and History. He is a board member of the Institute for African Studies and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and a member of the Committee on Global Thought. Larkin is the author of Signal and Noise: Media Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2008) and, co-editor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (University of California Press, 2000).

Monique I. Liston is an experienced evaluator and program designer. She founded UBUNTU Research and Evaluation as a professional learning community that prioritizes Black women and their leadership in building beloved communities. She is proud alum of Howard University with a BA in Sociology and the University of Delaware with a Master of Public Administration. In addition, she received her PhD in Urban Education from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. For the last ten years, she has worked with educational institutions including schools, district administrators and policymakers across the United States and internationally. Her research focuses on understanding human dignity as a measure of accountability for organizations working to address issues of racial equity. She loves Black people, Blackness and planning for liberation with love and accountability.

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Rick Lowe is a Houston-based artist who has exhibited and worked with communities nationally and internationally. his work has been exhibited at such national and international venues as Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, and the Venice Architecture Biennale, Phoenix Art Museum; the Kumamoto State Museum in Japan. His other community building projects have included the Arts Plan for the Seattle Public Library, the Borough Project for the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Delray Beach Cultural Loop in Florida, among others. He is best known for his Project Row Houses community-based art project that he started in Houston in 1993. Among Rick’s honors are the Rudy Bruner Awards in Urban Excellence, the AIA Keystone Award, the Heinz Award in the arts and humanities, the Skowhegan Governor’s Award, the Skandalaris Award for Art/Architecture, and a U.S. Artists Booth Fellowship. He has served as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University, a Mel King Fellow at MIT, an Auburn University Breedan Scholar, and a Stanford University Haas Center Distinguished Visitor. President Barack Obama appointed Rick to the National Council on the Arts in 2013; in 2014 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

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AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist with an abiding interest in the spatial and social compositions of urban regions. He is a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, visiting professor of sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, visiting professor at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, research associate with the Rujak Center for Urban Studies in Jakarta, and research fellow at the University of Tarumanagara. He has an extensive background working in urban areas of Africa, South and Southeast Asia, with interest in the everyday lives of Muslim working-class residents. Simone has worked with practices of social interchange, technical arrangements, local economy, and the constitution of power relations that affect how heterogeneous cities are lived. He has worked on remaking municipal systems, training local government personnel, designing collaborative partnerships among technicians, residents, artists, and politicians. His work deals with a multiplicity of propositions and capacities for relationships that remain untapped in popular districts across urban Asia and Africa, even though they are deployed everyday under the rubric of “popular economies.” He also explores the effects of globalized generic blackness as an organizing instrument of urban life and the kinds of political instruments that are entailed in circumventing racialized control systems.

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Unfortunately Fatima El-Tayeb will no longer be able to speak at the conference.