Desireé R. Melonas is an assistant professor in the departments of Political Science and Black Study at the University of California, Riverside. She searches and teaches in the areas of Black political thought, Black geographies, new materialism, and Black feminist thought, and is working on a book manuscript entitled Place in Black: Moving Racial Geographies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in, among others, Theory & Event, Meridians, Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ), National Review of Black Politics, Philosophy and Global Affairs, the Journal of Women, and Politics & Policy. Melonas is a 2020–2021 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow and is currently a co-principal investigator on a $1.25 million National Academies of Sciences grant to assist in developing environmental justice-focused, community-engaged curricular interventions in Africatown, AL, and surrounding areas. She is based in Riverside, CA.
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is a professor of global and international studies at the University of California, Irvine, and Professor Extraordinarius in the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair at University of South Africa. Willoughby-Herard is the author of Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability (University of California Press, 2015) and of articles in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International; African Identities; Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies; Abolition Journal; Race & Class; National Political Science Review; Social Justice; Theory & Event; and Kroeber Anthropology Society Papers, among other publications. They are based in Irvine, CA.
Zahra Ahmed is a scholar-activist who has worked in higher education and other community-based educational spaces for over twenty years. She currently serves as an associate professor of Justice, Community, and Leadership at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her teaching and research focus on Black feminist pedagogy, contemplative justice and critical community engagement. She earned her master’s degree in Social Work from Georgia State University with a focus on community partnerships and her PhD in political science from the University of California, Irvine, with a focus on civic and community engagement. She is based in Moraga, CA.
