aems emswiler serves as Archival Fellow for the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP), a community-based documentary project that cultivates deeper understandings of the impacts of interpersonal and state-sanctioned violence on individuals, families, and communities. Their research seeks to understand censorship as violence, archives as spaces of abolition imagination, and critical trans politics as a means of transformative social change. emswiler explores carceral logics’ attempt to regulate communities marked as deviant by the state. At TAVP, they conduct oral history interviews with queer and trans people impacted by state violence. They are currently pursuing a dual Masters in Information Sciences (MSIS) and Women’s and Gender Studies (MA) at The University of Texas at Austin, and hold a BA in English Literature and Feminist Studies from Southwestern University. 

Karen Engle is Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and the founder and co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas School of Law. She researches and writes on the interaction between social movements and law, particularly in the fields of international human rights law, international criminal law, and Latin American law. She is author of The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law (forthcoming, 2020) and The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (2010), which received the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association Section on Human Rights. She co-edited Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda (2016) and After Identity: A Reader in Law and Culture (1995). She has held fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Engle holds a JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and a BA with honors from Baylor University.

Ashley D. Farmer is Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is an historian who researches black women's history, intellectual history, and radical politics. Farmer authored Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (2017), the first comprehensive study of black women's intellectual production and activism in the Black Power era. She also co-edited New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (2018), an anthology that examines four central themes within the black intellectual tradition: black internationalism, religion and spirituality, racial politics and struggles for social justice, and black radicalism. Farmer's research has been featured in several popular outlets including Vibe, NPR, and CSPAN. Farmer holds an MA and PhD from Harvard University and a BA from Spelman College.

Christopher Garcia-Wilde is an MD and an MPH candidate at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He recently completed field experience at the Houston Recovery Center for his Master of Public Health. Garcia-Wilde’s research centers on addiction medicine and critical epidemiology. He recently presented a paper titled “Re-Framing Racism in Medical School Lectures” at the 2019 Social Medicine Consortium Conference in Chiapas, Mexico. Garcia-Wilde is a community organizer who works with White Coats for Black Lives, a medical-student run organization seeking to safeguard the lives and well-being of patients through the elimination of racism. He also works with the Miami Squad of the Dream Defenders, a local collective focused on building a movement for freedom and liberation in Florida. Garcia-Wilde holds a BS in Microbiology and Cell Science with a minor in Women’s Studies from the University of Florida.

As a Hogg Peer Policy Fellow, Kevin Garrett works with the Texas Jail Project on issues related to mental health and contributes to their mission to improve conditions and treatment of people in Texas county jails. Garrett was formerly incarcerated in two county jails and in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) prison system. While in TDCJ, he saw that individuals in need of mental health and substance abuse services were given generic diagnoses and housed in the general population with other offenders. Garrett went from being homeless in 2006 to earning a BA in Paralegal Studies and graduating magna cum laude from Texas Wesleyan University in 2011. He holds a JD from the Oklahoma City University School of Law, where he received the CALI Excellence for the Future Award in Texas criminal procedure, given to the highest scoring student. Garrett hopes someday to be eligible to take the Texas Bar Examination. 

RUTH WILSON GILMORE is a renowned activist and public scholar known for her work on prison abolition. She is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and American Studies, as well as director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In addition to her work on abolition, Gilmore writes and lectures extensively on a range of subjects, including racial capitalism, organized violence, changing state structure, the aesthetics and politics of seeing, and labor and social movements. She authored the award-winning book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007) and spearheaded the development of the field of carceral geography. Her multiple honors include the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (2012); the Association of American Geographers Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice (2014); the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); and the American Studies Association Richard A. Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017). In addition to her scholarly work, Professor Gilmore co-founded several grassroots organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She holds a PhD in economic geography and social theory from Rutgers University.

Aya Gruber is Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School and Fellow in the Center for Values and Social Policy at the University of Colorado. She teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law and procedure, critical theory, feminism, and comparative/international law. Gruber’s scholarship focuses primarily on feminist efforts to strengthen criminal law responses to crimes against women. She has a book, The Feminist War On Crime, forthcoming from UC Press and co-authored Comparative Criminal Procedure: United States, Argentina, and the Netherlands (2012). Gruber’s recent publications include “Equal Protection under the Carceral State” (NW.U.L.Rev., 2018), “Consent Confusion” (Cardozo L.Rev., 2017), and “Governance Feminism in New York’s Human Trafficking Intervention Courts,” with A. Cohen, in Governance Feminism: A Handbook (2019). Gruber received Colorado Law School’s Jules Milstein Scholarship Award in 2017. She holds a JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and a BA summa cum laude in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley.

Jason Hernandez is an advocate for clemency process reform and serves on the board of the Buried Alive Project, which works to eliminate life-without-parole sentences handed down under federal drug law. Hernandez is known as one of “Obama’s Eight”—the first wave of low-level, nonviolent drug offenders to be granted clemency by President Barack Obama. While in prison, Hernandez became a respected “jailhouse attorney” and was paid to work on other prisoners’ cases, many of which involved parental rights, child support, and divorce. Hernandez contributed an Op-Ed piece to The New York Times titled “The Power of Clemency” (Jan 2018). Also in 2018, Hernandez received a Latino Justice Media Fellowship and a Soros Justice Fellowship. He is developing a curriculum and toolkit to support clemency campaigns, working with the legal clinic at the Texas A&M University School of Law and New York University.

</emNeville Hoad is Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty with the Center for Women's and Gender Studies and the Center for African and African American Studies. He is co-directer of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. Hoad’s research interests include African and Victorian literature; queer theory; international human rights law pertaining to sexual orientations; and sexuality and gender issues in Southern Africa. He has authored African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (2007) and co-edited Sex and Politics in South Africa (2005). Hoad contributed “The Men of Blanket Boy's Moon: Repugnancy Clauses, Customary Law and Migrant Labour Sex” to New Intimacies, Old Desires: Law, Culture and Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times (2017). His current book project focuses on literary and cultural representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. Hoad holds a PhD from Columbia University.

Danielle Jefferis is Clinical Teaching Fellow in the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Her research interests include alternatives to immigration detention, prison abolition, the militarization of law enforcement, and prison privatization. Before joining the Denver Law faculty, Jefferis was Nadine Strossen Fellow with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project in New York. There, she worked on issues related to post-9/11 racial and religious discrimination, and the intersection of national security and criminal justice. Her articles include “Constitutionally Unaccountable: Privatized Immigration Detention” in the Indiana L. J. (forthcoming); “It’s Just Like Prison: Is a Civil (Nonpunitive) System of Immigration Detention Theoretically Possible?” with René Lima Marín in the Denver L. Rev. (forthcoming); and “Battlefield Borders, Threat Rhetoric, and the Militarization of State and Local Law Enforcement,” in the American University National Security Law Brief (2012). Jefferis received her JD from Georgetown University Law Center and her BA from New York University, where she majored in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.

David Johnson is Criminal Justice Organizer at Grassroots Leadership. Through a two-year Peer Policy Fellowship from the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, Johnson supports Grassroot Leadership's efforts to promote the effective treatment of mental illness and substance use as an alternative to their criminalization. His lived experience as a formerly incarcerated person thriving in active recovery from addiction with a mental health diagnosis frames and contributes to this work. He is an active volunteer and recovery ambassador for Solstice Recovery Foundation, an Austin-based non-profit that supports addiction recovery. He also actively supports Oxford House, Austin Recovery, RecoveryATX, and NAMI.

Lauren Johnson is the Criminal Justice Outreach Coordinator in the Policy Department of the ACLU of Texas, which she joined in 2017. The seed of passion for social justice that led her to the ACLU grew out of her experiences within the criminal legal system. Prior to being hired, Lauren worked alongside other ACLU staff on criminal justice reform policies at the local and state level that led to the first Fair Chance Hiring ordinance in the southern United States to apply to private employers, removing the lifetime ban placed on people with felony drug convictions who would otherwise qualify for food assistance and codifying a law to prevent video from being the primary visitation available in county jails across the state. Lauren has been recognized for her work by Grassroots Leadership, The Texas Observer, and the Texas Council on Family Relations.

Nolan Krueger is a doctoral student in Counseling Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and an advanced extern in the Southwestern University Counseling Center. As a Ford Fellow for 2019-22, Kreuger will create a study aimed at better understanding the relationship between well-being and suicidality among multiracial college students. His research investigates multiracial identity, and the health effects of multiracial-specific phenomena on both psychological well-being and behavioral health for mixed-race individuals; minority status stressors; and the psychosocial experiences impacting students of color in higher education. Kreuger’s co-authored articles include “Black people's racial identity and their acceptance of Black-White Multiracial people” in Group Processes and Intergroup Relations (2019) and “Learning While Black: A Culturally Informed Model of the Impostor Phenomenon for Black Graduate Students” in the Journal of Black Psychology (2018), Krueger holds a BS in Clinical Psychology from the University of California at San Diego.

Sarah Lamble is Assistant Dean for Teaching, Learning, and Student Experience; Reader in Criminology and Queer Theory; and Director of Studies in Criminology, at the Birkbeck University of London. Lamble’s research interests lie at the intersections of gender, sexuality and criminal justice; law, social movements, and knowledge production; and cultures of violence, control and punishment. Publications include “The Marketisation of Prison Alternatives” in Criminal Justice Matters (2014) and “Queer necropolitics and the expanding carceral state: interrogating sexual investments in punishment” in Law and Critique (2013). Lamble is co-editor of the Social Justice Book Series with Routledge, a steering group member for the Reclaim Justice Network. Lamble is also co-founder of the Bent Bars Project, a collective that coordinates a letter-writing program for LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming prisoners in Britain. Lamble holds a PhD from Kent Law School, an MA in Criminology from the University of Toronto, and a BA in Cultural Studies at the University of Trent in Peterborough, Canada.

Jennifer Laurin is the Wright C. Morrow Professor of Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Laurin studies and writes about how law and institutional design shape the functioning of criminal justice institutions.  Her scholarship has considered, the role of constitutional litigation in regulating police, the shared roles of courts, police, and lawyers in regulating forensic science, and oversight of indigent defense.  Laurin is a co-author (with Michael Avery, David Rudovsky, and Karen Blum) of Police Misconduct: Law and Litigation, the leading treatise in that area of civil rights litigation.  Laurin is active in criminal justice law reform efforts. She currently serves as Reporter to the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Standards Task Force charged with updating the 1996 3rd Edition Discovery Standards, and she is the former Chair of the Texas Capital Punishment Assessment team, organized under the auspices of the American Bar Association. Laurin holds an undergraduate degree in Politics from Earlham College and a JD from Columbia Law School.

Marisol LeBrón is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on social inequality, policing, violence, and protest movements in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. LeBrón’s book, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (2019), examines the growth of punitive governance in contemporary Puerto Rico. She co-edited Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (2019) and has published articles and reviews for academic and public audiences. LeBrón is one of the co-creators and project leaders for the Puerto Rico Syllabus (#PRsyllabus), a digital resource for understanding the Puerto Rican debt crisis. LeBron holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University and a BA from Oberlin College in Comparative American Studies (Honors) and Latin American Studies.

Kate Levine is Associate Professor in the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. Her research and teaching interests focus on criminal law, criminal procedure, policing, evidence and the legal ethics of criminal lawyering. Levine’s publications include “Discipline and Policing” (Duke L. J., 2018), “We Need to Talk About Police Disciplinary Records” (Fordham Urb. L.J., 2017) and “Who Shouldn’t Prosecute the Police” (Iowa L. Rev., 2016). Prior to her current position, Levine was Assistant Professor of Law at St. John’s University. She holds a JD from Harvard Law School and an AB in American History and Literature from Harvard College.

</emRobyn Maynard is a Toronto-based black feminist writer, abolitionist, and community activist. She has been a part of grassroots movements against racial profiling, police violence, and punitive detention and deportation practices for over a decade. Maynard's book, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (2017), won the 2019 Prix de Libraires in the category of “essais” and the 2017 Annual Errol Morris Book Prize. Her recent articles include “Do Black Sex Workers' Lives Matter? White Washed Anti-Slavery, Racial Justice and Abolition” in Red Light Labour: Regulation, Agency and Resistance (2018) and “Reading Black Resistance through Afrofuturism: Notes on Post-Apocalyptic Blackness and Black Rebel Cyborgs in Canada” in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (2018). Maynard has presented before Senate committees and the United Nations. She is currently a doctoral student and Vanier scholar at the University of Toronto.

Thenjiwe Tameika McHarris is co-founder of Blackbird, which provides communications, organizing, and policy/advocacy support to a growing field committed to ending racism in the United States and globally. She began her political career calling for an end to policies and practices that contribute to acts of torture committed by law enforcement. McHarris campaigns on human rights issues in the United States and around the world, including those that address the illicit and illegal trafficking of small arms, solitary confinement, capital punishment, maternal deaths, excessive use of force by law enforcement, and poverty. McHarris has worked for human rights organizations including Amnesty International and, most recently, the U.S. Human Rights Network where she helped coordinate efforts to hold the U.S.G accountable for its human rights violations when the United States was up for review by specific UN Mechanisms. McHarris is currently working with social justice organizations and movements in the US to help establish a collective for organizers engaged in movement-building work around the world.

Will McKeithen is a doctoral candidate and instructor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. Their research focuses on the structural violence and lived experience of toxicity in the US. Other research interests include the biopolitics of health, US mass incarceration, geographies of gender and sexuality, feminist political economy, and environmental justice. McKeithen’s article, “Queer Ecologies of Home: Heteronormativity, Speciesism, and the Strange Intimacies of Crazy Cat Ladies,” was published in Gender, Place, and Culture (2017) and they co-authored “Worms and Workers: Placing the Nonhuman and the Biological in Social Reproduction” (Society and Space, 2017). McKeithen was an Interdisciplinary Pedagogy (PIP) Fellow at the University of Washington, Bothell (2017-18). They hold an MA in Geography from the University of Washington and a BS in Culture and Politics from Georgetown University.

<emZinaida Miller is Assistant Professor of International Law and Human Rights at Seton Hall University. Her scholarship focuses on the conceptualization, management, and regulation of post-conflict/transitional territories and populations, particularly in the areas of human rights, humanitarian aid, and transitional justice. She is co-editor, with Karen Engle and D.M. Davis, of Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda (2017) and recently published "Time, Law and Judgment" (Temple Int’l & Comp. L. J., 2018), as well as a new book chapter, “Distributing Justice: Transitional Justice and Stabilisation in North Africa” in Stabilising the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). Miller and two colleagues were awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant to fund their project, “The Margins of Accountability” (2019). Miller holds a PhD from The Fletcher School at Tufts University, a JD from Harvard Law School, an MALD in International Relations at Tufts University, and an AB from Brown University. 

Claudia Muñoz is the Immigration Programs Director at Grassroots Leadership in Austin, Texas. Born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico, she has lived in Texas since 2001. After her nephew was detained by ICE, Muñoz began to organize with other undocumented youth nationwide to secure his release and demand dignity for all immigrants. She has worked for various labor and immigrant rights organizations throughout the country, including the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, since 2009. Muñoz is a graduate of Prairie View A&M University.

Marlene Nava Ramos is a doctoral candidate in Geography at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center where she studies the United States political economy of immigration enforcement. Her dissertation project explores the growth of New Jersey's multi-level jurisdictional system of confinement and immigration detention in county jails from 1985 to the present. Her research studies immigration detention as a system embedded in the rise of imprisonment and the most recent carceral reforms, which are transforming and reinforcing systems of surveillance and control. Nava Ramos is an Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Geospatial Sciences at Lehman College. She holds an MPH from Columbia University and a BS in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University.

Vasuki Nesiah is Associate Professor of Practice at the Gallatin School of Individual Study at New York University. Nesiah’s research interests include international human rights, law and social theory, and the politics of war and memory. A founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), Nesiah has published widely on the history and politics of human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal law, international feminisms, and colonial legal history, with a particular focus on transitional justice and reparations. Nesiah co-edited A Global History of Bandung and Critical Traditions in International Law (Cambridge UP, 2017). She recently contributed “Indebted: The Cruel Optimism of Leaning-In to Empowerment” to Governance Feminisms: Notes from the Field (U of MN Press, 2019). Nesiah was a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School and practiced at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). She holds both a JD and SJD from Harvard Law School and a BA in Philosophy and Government from Cornell University.

Arparna Polavarapu is Associate Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law. Her research focuses on the rule of law and human rights, with particular emphasis on land rights and customary/statutory law interaction. Much of her scholarship draws from her direct experience working with women and women’s rights groups in various nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Polavarapu’s scholarship includes “Global Carceral Feminism and Domestic Violence: What the West can Learn from Reconciliation in Uganda” (forthcoming, Harv. J. L. & Gender) and “Expanding Standing to Protect Democracy” (Yale J. Int’l L., 2016). Polavarapu holds an LLM in Advocacy and a JD from the Georgetown University Law Center, an MALD in International Affairs from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a BS in Brain and Cognitive Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jhody Polk is Lead Organizer and Founder of the Legal Empowerment and Advocacy Hub (LEAH), the first Participatory Defense Hub in Florida. LEAH is a community organizing model designed to combat mass incarceration, humanize defendants, impact the outcomes of cases, and transform the landscape of power in the court system. A formerly incarcerated law clerk, Polk received a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship in 2018, when she founded the Jailhouse Lawyer’s Initiative, a network dedicated to the legal empowerment of jailhouse lawyers and enhancing the law clerk training program and law libraries in prisons throughout the United States. Polk is also the current director of the Alachua County Reentry Coalition, the executive director and founder of the Florida Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, and the director of community justice at the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding. She served as the central Florida organizer on the successful campaign to restore voting rights to over 1.5 million Florida residents with felony convictions. She is a dedicated member of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, the League of Women Voters, the National Lawyers Guild, and Fight Toxic Prisons.

Annette Price is Statewide Director with Grassroots Leadership’s Texas Advocates for Justice, a membership-based organization of formerly incarcerated individuals and their families. Members are trained in organizing and advocacy to advance their mission to end mass incarceration in Texas. Price has been involved with reentry programs to assist those with criminal justice involvement since 2016, as the Austin/Travis County Reentry Roundtable (A/TCRRT) Fellow. A/TCRRT addresses the challenges to reentry and reintegration faced by formerly incarcerated individuals. As part of her fellowship, Price participated in writing a Housing Guide for Apartment Managers. She previously served on the board of directors for Truth Be Told, a nonprofit organization that aims to provide transformational programs for women who are or who have been incarcerated. Price holds a double Masters degree in Substance Abuse and Professional Counseling from Grand Canyon University. 

Roger Reeves is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Before coming to UT, he was Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His first book of poetry, King Me, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2013 and was placed on the "Best Poetry Books of the Year" list from Library Journal. He is a faculty affiliate of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2015 Whiting Award, a 2013 NEA Fellowship, a 2013 Pushcart Prize, a 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, and two Cave Canem Fellowships. During the 2014 school year, he was a Hodder Fellow of Princeton University. He holds a BA from Morehouse College, an MA in English from Texas A&M University, as well as an MFA and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

Jorge Antonio Renaud is Regional Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Southwest for LatinoJustice PRLDEF (Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund). He has written extensively about how to alleviate the United States’s obsession with incarceration and disproportionate sentences. As a former Policy Analyst at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, Renaud authored dozens of bills in 2013 and 2015 that addressed Texas prison conditions and parole supervision. As a Senior Policy Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative, he explored ways to scale back the unimaginably long sentences given to hundreds of thousands of incarcerated individuals. Renaud has an MS in Social Work from the University of Texas at Austin and a BS in Psychology from Sam Houston State University, earned while he was serving time in prison for robbery.

Michael Reyes Salas is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies social constructions of criminality in carceral narratives and French penal colony heritage. His dissertation examines the liberation struggles of imprisoned writers through a literary analysis of their memoirs and auto-fictional texts. Reyes Salas has been the recipient of the Rapoport Center Graduate Summer Fellowship, an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. His publications include “Institutionally Complicit: Challenging Leadership Orthodoxies in Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs” (Thinking Gender Papers, 2019) and “Marassa and Mestiza Consciousness: Comparing Danticat and Anzaldúa” (El Mundo Zurdo, 2016). Reyes Salas holds an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in English, Highest Honors, with a minor in French from the University of California Los Angeles.

Luis Romero is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University. His research and teaching focus on Latinas/os/xs, racial inequality, crimmigration, immigration enforcement, and detention. He published “Islamophobia and the Making of Latinos/as into Terrorist Threats” (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2018) and co-authored “Immigration Detention, Inc.” (Journal on Migration and Human Security, 2018). Romero’s current work explores how immigrant families with a detained relative are surveilled and impacted both economically and emotionally. Romero was a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Southwestern University (2018-19). He holds a PhD and an MA in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin, a BA in Sociology, Certificate in Race and Ethnicity, from Texas A&M University. 

<emAndreia Beatriz Silva dos Santos is a Brazilian medical doctor and activist whose work addresses the impact of state violence on Brazil’s Black community. A Black liberation leader, dos Santos is the co-founder of Quilombo Xis - Açao Cultural Comunitária, a human rights organization that promotes the Reaja ou Será Morta/React or Die anti-Black racism and anti-police brutality movement in Brazil. She also developed the project Saude e Cultura Intramuros (Health and Culture Behind the Walls). She brings together prison abolition and public health by providing health services and resources to persons who are incarcerated. For the past decade, dos Santos has served as one of only a handful of medical doctors for the state penitentiary in Bahia, Brazil (LEMOS). Dos Santos also works closely with the relatives and friends of prisoners to support resistance to the genocide of Black people.

<emChristen Smith is an Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is affiliated with the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. Smith’s research focuses on engendered anti-Black state violence and Black community responses to it in Brazil and the Americas. Her book is titled Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil (2016). Smith published “Facing the Dragon: Black Mothers, Gendered Necropolitics, Anti-black violence and Radical Refusal in the Americas” in Transforming Anthropology (2016). In November 2017, she created Cite Black Women as a radical praxis in citation that honors Black women’s transnational intellectual production. Smith holds a PhD and an MA in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Stanford University and an AB in Anthropology, with a Certificate in African-American Studies and Near Eastern Studies, from Princeton University.

Jordan Steiker is Judge Robert M. Parker Endowed Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law, where he also directs the Law School’s Capital Punishment Center. Steiker has written extensively on constitutional law, federal habeas corpus, and the death penalty. His book, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment (with Carol Steiker, JD, 2016) won the 2017 Robert W. Hamilton Book Award. Recent articles include “Extraordinary Injustice in Texas Death Penalty Case Needs” (National Law J., 2016) and “The American Death Penalty and the (In)Visibility of Race” (with Carol Steiker, U. Chi. L. Rev., 2015). In 2010, Jordan Steiker and Carol Steiker authored a report that led the American Law Institute to vote to withdraw the capital punishment section of its Model Penal Code. Steiker served as the Touroff-Glueck Visiting Professor of Law and Psychiatry at Harvard Law School in 2018. Before joining the University of Texas School of Law, Steiker served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall. Steiker holds a JD from Harvard University and a BA from Wesleyan University. 

<emHari Ziyad is an artist and the Editor-in-Chief of the digital publication, RaceBaitr. Their work engages with identity, race, gender and sexuality, ally politics, and the arts. It is informed by Ziyad’s passion for storytelling and wrestling with identity as a black, non-binary child of Muslim and Hindu parents while growing up in Cleveland. They authored Black Boy Out of Time: A Never Coming of Age Story (forthcoming, 2020) and recently published “The Future is Black: Afropessimism, Fugitivity and Radical Hope in Education” in Critical Ethnic Studies (2018). Other work has appeared in, for example, Gawker, Out, and The Guardian. Ziyad is a script consultant on the drama series David Makes Man (Oprah Winfrey Network) and Managing Editor for an online platform, Black Youth Project. Ziyad holds a BFA from New York University, where they concentrated in Film & Television and Psychology.