Bios
PANELISTS:
Dr. Celeste Winston is an abolitionist geographer and Assistant Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University. Her work is driven by her love and accountability for Black people and communities. She centers everyday Black life and placemaking practices as models for liberation. She aims to help build a more livable and equitable world by tracing legacies of Black alternative ways of living across space and time. Dr. Winston’s first book How to Lose the Hounds: Maroon Geographies and a World beyond Policing is a guide to police abolition connecting slavery-era Black freedom struggles and modern efforts to build a world beyond policing. Amid rising calls for abolition, the book reveals long-standing ways to secure public safety and community well-being without police.
Dr. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California Los Angeles. He has published in academic journals ranging from Public Affairs Quarterly, One Earth, Philosophical Papers, and the American Philosophical Association newsletter Philosophy and the Black Experience.
Táíwò’s theoretical work draws liberally from the Black radical tradition, anti-colonial thought, German transcendental philosophy, contemporary philosophy of language, contemporary social science, and histories of activism and activist thinkers.
His public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism, has been featured in The New Yorker, The Nation, Boston Review, Dissent, The Appeal, Slate, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, Aeon, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of Elite Capture and Reconsidering Reparations.
Corey Shaw, Jr is a DC native with lifelong roots in Ward 7. As a graduate of both Anacostia Senior High School and the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), Shaw has a passion for comprehending the needs of communities and helping them advocate and mobilize for structural change.
Corey first got his start working with communities in Washington, DC as the Co-Founder of the Black Broad Branch Project. In his capacity as an oral historian and chair of the policy implementation working committee, Shaw has advocated for reparations for two families whose ancestors were displaced from Chevy Chase, DC in 1928. He continues to support the project, engaging with descendants to mobilize a coalition of scholars, DC residents, and community organizations toward the goals of Acknowledgement, Compensation, and Education. With the collective efforts of the coalition, the Black Broad Branch Project has succeeded in constructing educational curriculum for 3rd, 6th, and 12thgrade students in DCPS, testified before the DC City Council, and presented in many forums ranging from the realm of academia to the United Nations.
Corey has joined the team at Empower DC as the DC Legacy Project Director. His focus is preserving the Barry Farm Historic Landmark which Empower DC won alongside the community in 2020. Shaw manages relationships with key and prospective stakeholders to ensure that a cohesive coalition is invested manifesting the community’s vision of an uplifting space is realized. He has taken the vision for Barry Farm, its history, into spaces across the city to include the Undesign the Redline exhibit, Ward 8 Health Council, and the DC Initiative on Racial Equity. Corey is committed to working alongside the former residents of Barry Farm and the community of Ward 8 to bring a new, dynamic, and enriching resource to Ward 8.
Dr. Sabiyha Prince is a cultural anthropologist, filmmaker and visual artist who has been researching and writing about African American life and culture for over two decades. Dr. Prince is the founding director of AnthroDocs, LLC, a qualitative research firm based in Washington, DC. A published author of ethnographies and journal articles, Prince has also led anti-apartheid, environmental justice, and racial equity campaigns for the Washington Office on Africa, Greenpeace, and Empower DC. She co-directed the award winning documentary Barry Farm in 2021 and wrote and directed this year’s Diminished Returns which examines the racial wealth gap in Washington, DC. Her media appearances include MSNBC, NPR, Al Jazeera English, Sirius XM, WHUR, WOL, WPFW, and WYPR. Prince has exhibited at 11Eleven Gallery, The Anacostia Arts Center, The Art League, and Zenith Gallery among other locations. Her work can be viewed on IG @anthro_artz and at www.sabiyhaprince.com.
Dr. Kwame Edwin Otu is an Associate Professor in the African Studies Program at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Otu is a cultural anthropologist with interests ranging from the politics of sexual, environmental, and technological citizenships, public health, to their intersections with shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora.
Otu’s first book monograph, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana, is part of the New Sexual Worlds Series published by the University of California Press. The book is an ethnography on queer self-fashioning among a community of self-identified effeminate men, known in local parlance as sasso. In the monograph, he draws on African philosophy, African/Black feminisms, and African and African Diasporic literature to explore how sasso navigate homophobia and the increased visibility of LGBT human rights politics in neoliberal Ghana.
Otu’s current/ongoing project investigates the global politics of e-waste in particular, and the undulations of global environmental transitions, in general, and their impacts on African and African-descended bodies. Entitled The Salvage Slot: Technology and the Ecologies of the After-Afterlife, it is an ethnography on waste workers on an e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, that investigates Africa’s paradoxical location as a site of extraction and deposition.
Dr. LaToya Eaves is an Associate Professor of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Tennessee. A proud North Carolinian, her research is informed by her Southern upbringing – focusing on power and place by examining social and political inequalities through Black, queer, and feminist geographies frameworks. Eaves has published extensively, including in Southeastern Geographer and Gender, Place, and Culture, and is a co-editor of the recently published Spatial Futures: Difference and the Post Anthropocene. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Ronald F. Abler Distinguished Service Honors from the American Association of Geographers.
Dr. Danielle Purifoy, JD, Ph.D (she/they), is an assistant professor of Geography and
Environment at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she also serves as
a faculty project lead for the UNC Environmental Justice Action Research Clinic.
Danielle’s research intersects Geography, Law, Environmental Studies, and Black
Studies to learn about Black placemaking practices from town formation to ecological
stewardship. She is the former Race and Place editor of Scalawag, a media organization
devoted to Southern storytelling, journalism, and the arts. You can find her work in
Society and Space, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Inside Higher
Ed, Environmental Sociology, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,
Scalawag, Oxford American, and Southern Cultures, among other publications.
Dr. J.T. Roane is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Geography and Mellon chair in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. He is author of Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place.
Poet and scholar Dr. Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series), selected by Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review, and her poems and essays have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Sewanee Review, among many others. Priest is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Curator of Community Programs & Practice at the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP).
MODERATORS:
Before coming to Georgetown, Moore received her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University. She received a Dual B.A. in Africana Studies and Public Policy at New York University, where she graduated summa cum laude as the 2019 Valedictorian of the College and Arts and Science.