Sa’ed Atshan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. He previously taught at UC Berkeley and Swarthmore College, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, and holds a PhD from Harvard University. He is the author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press) and coauthor (with Katharina Galor) of The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press). He is a leader in the field of Palestinian Studies and his work is increasingly connected to Black Studies. Dr. Atshan was inducted into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College in October 2022. He previously coauthored (with Darnell Moore) an article entitled, “Reciprocal Solidarity: Where the Black and Palestinian Queer Struggles Meet.” Atshan is currently embarking upon a new research project on African American and Palestinian Quakers and the intersections of race and Christianity in the United States and Palestine/Israel. He has organized several successful conferences, including one on LGBTQ movements in the Middle East and North Africa at Brown (funded by the Open Society Foundations), one on resisting Antisemitism locally and globally at Swarthmore, and a Mellon Foundation conference for students of color, also at Swarthmore.

Erica Lorraine Williams is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Spelman College. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and her B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from New York University. Her first book, Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (2013), won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. She also co-edited The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology (2018), and has published peer-reviewed journal articles in Feminist Anthropology, Transforming Anthropology, Feminist Studies, Gender, Place, and Culture; and several book chapters in edited volumes. She is currently working on a book on Black feminist activism in Salvador, Brazil and a travel memoir. She is the Book and Film Review Editor for Transforming Anthropology, the journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA), and she serves on the Governing Council of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). Winner of the Vulcan Teaching Excellence Award, she teaches courses on gender and sexuality, race and identity in Latin America, globalization, and feminist ethnography. She traveled to Palestine in 2013 as an HBCU Fellowship recipient of the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) Faculty Development Seminar.

Dr. Makungu Akinyela is a scholar activist, a practicing psychotherapist and an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Georgia State University. As a scholar activist and a therapist, Dr. Akinyela has been a committed Social Justice organizer for over forty-years focused on struggles for human rights, self-determination, and justice for Black people in the United States and the African diaspora. His research and writing include such subjects as decolonizing mental health care; cultural domination and therapeutic resistance; reparations and the role of mental health workers in repairing oppressions wounds and African centered family therapy. Dr. Akinyela has worked internationally in such places as Palestine, Cuba, and South Africa. He is a Clinical Fellow of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, the Journal of Systemic Therapy and the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work.

Diana is a Palestinian human rights lawyer, analyst and writer based in Haifa. Diana previously served as a lawyer to the Palestine Liberation Organization and later became an advisor to the Palestinian president. Diana is a frequent commentator on Palestine, with her writings and commentaries appearing in in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Boston Globe. She is a frequent commentator to CNN, BBC, the Wall Street Journal and Al Jazeera among others. Ms Buttu holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Toronto, Queen’s University and Northwestern University. She has been a fellow at the Stanford Centre for Conflict Resolution and Negotiation, at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Law School.

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is the Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions at Temple University. He is also the host of UpFront on Al Jazeera. Since his days as a youth in Philadelphia, Dr. Hill has been a social justice activist and organizer. He has worked on campaigns to end the death penalty, abolish prisons, and release numerous political prisoners. Dr. Hill has also worked in solidarity with human rights movements around the world. He is the founder and director of The People’s Education Center in Philadelphia, as well as the owner of Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books.

Dr. Hill is the author or co-author of seven books, including the award-winning Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on The Vulnerable from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond; We Still Here: Pandemics, Policing, Protest, and Possibility; and Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. Dr. Hill holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) from the University of Pennsylvania. His research agenda focuses on the intersections between culture, politics, and education in the United States and the Middle East.

Karida L. Brown is a sociologist, professor, oral historian, and public intellectual whose research centers on the ontologies of systemic racism and the fullness of Black life. An educator, public speaker, author, and humanist, she is known for empowering her readership, students, and organizations to be active participants in driving equity and justice. Dr. Brown's body of work combines her expertise in data-driven social science research, her vast experience in navigating complex global organizations, and her love of the arts. These insights bring actionable and reparative knowledge to the public. Dr. Brown graduated from Uniondale High School in Long Island, New York and attended Temple University in Philadelphia, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration in risk management and insurance. After a six-year career in the commercial insurance industry, Brown returned to school, and subsequently earned a master’s in government administration from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University.

She is a Professor of Sociology at Emory University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on race and racism, sports and society, and historical archival methods. In addition to her books, her research is published in various peer-reviewed academic journals such as the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Southern Cultures, and The Du Bois Review. Dr. Brown is a Fulbright Scholar, and her international research has been supported by national foundations such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Hellman Fellows Fund. Brown currently serves on the board of The Obama Presidency Oral History Project. An educator, public speaker, author, and humanist known for her ability to empower her readership, students, and organizations to be active participants in driving equity and justice. She has been featured in such media outlets as Politico, Forbes, The LA Times, Sports Illustrated, and WUNC.

Aisha Finch is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. A formally trained scholar of the African Diaspora, her research focuses on the study of slavery and the practice of freedom in Cuba and the Atlantic World, Black feminist cultural critique, transnational Black feminisms, and Black political movements and social life in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the U.S. She is the author of Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844. Her current research focuses on Black/Afrofeminist intellectual histories in Latin America, and on histories of Black women and the sacred as disruptions of plantation violence.

Dr. Bayo Holsey's research and writing address public culture and history in West Africa and the African diaspora. She is the author of Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (University of Chicago Press, 2008), which won the Amaury Talbot Prize and the Toyin Falola Africa book award. Currently, she is completing a second book entitled Tyrannies of Freedom: Race, Power, and the Fictions of Late Capitalism.

Dr. Holsey received her PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and previously taught in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

Ahmad Abuznaid is a Florida-based attorney, director of the coming documentary film "Shukran 10 days in Palestine", and executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Prior to joining USCPR, Ahmad co-founded the Dream Defenders, serving as its legal & policy director and coo during his time there. Ahmad then went on to serve as the executive director of the National Network for Arab American Communities from 2017 to 2019.

Sophia Azeb (she/they) is an assistant professor of Black Studies in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sophia's current book project, "Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab," explores the currents of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across twentieth century North Africa and Europe. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, Sophia was a member of the faculty collective that founded the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.

Omar M. Dajani is Professor of Law at McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific, where he teaches Public International Law and U.S. Constitutional Law, among other courses. Omar’s scholarly and policy work focuses on the design of institutions and processes for managing identity conflict in divided places. His recent publications include: Federalism and Decentralization in the Contemporary Middle East (ed., with Aslı Bâli) (Cambridge University Press, 2023); Dear Omar, Dear Mira: Exploring Zionism Across the Ethnic Divide, SHOFAR: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies (with Mira Sucharov) (forthcoming, 2023).; Reimagining Confederalism in the Middle East, in Adam Getachew (ed.), Imagining Global Futures (Boston Review, 2022); and Israel’s Creeping Annexation, 111 AJIL Unbound 51-56 (2017). Before joining the faculty at McGeorge, Omar served as legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team in peace talks with Israel and as a political adviser in the office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO). Previously, Omar was a litigation associate at the Washington, D.C., office of Sidley & Austin and clerked for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He is a graduate of Northwestern University (B.A., History & American Studies) and Yale Law School.

A social scientist with an interdisciplinary doctoral degree in conflict analysis and resolution with 20+ years of experience designing and leading programs in the field of conflict mitigation, peacebuilding, advocacy, and nonviolent resistance in very complex international environments. She has taken part in multiple second track Palestinian-Israeli discussions and conducted hundreds of mediation sessions with antagonists in a variety of political situations, including Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Sudan, Turkey, Cyprus, Greece, and Bosnia.

Prior to joining TCC, she was an Adjunct Professor at George Mason University's Carter School for Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding, where she earned her Ph.D. Her award-winning doctoral dissertation captured the effects of "everyday resistance on relations of power" as well as the practices and strategies adopted by ordinary Palestinians living under oppression in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She currently writes for peer reviewed academic articles on decolonizing resistance, the immediate outcomes of everyday resistance, and peacebuilding through the lenses of local ordinary citizens. Carol is also a Non-Resident Scholar at the Middle East Institute where she publishes policy and briefing papers on Palestine and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.

In addition to the "best dissertation award" from the Peace and Justice Studies Association in 2020, she also received the John Burton award for academic excellence twice and the James H. Laue Scholarship for her contributions to the field of conflict resolution. She was awarded a George Mason Provost scholarship for her field research and, in 2019, the coveted American Association of University Women Dissertation Award (AAUW).

Katherine Franke is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University, and Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. She is the founder and Faculty Director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project, and the Equal Rights Amendment Project. She is also on the Executive Committees of Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation's leading scholars writing on law, sexuality race, and religion drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory. She worked regularly in the West Bank with Palestinian academics until 2018 when she was deported by the state of Israel on account of her criticism of Israel’s human rights record, and was banned from reentering the country. Her first book, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality (NYU Press 2015), considers the costs of winning marriage rights for same sex couples today and for African Americans at the end of the Civil War. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to undertake research for Wedlocked. Her second book, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Slavery’s Abolition (Haymarket Press 2019), makes the case for racial reparations in the United States by returning to a time at the end of slavery when many formerly enslaved people were provided land explicitly as a form of reparation, yet after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated the land was stolen back from freed people and given to former slave owners.

Justin is a humanistic social scientist and Black studies scholar. His ethnographic work explores Black social and cultural life in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Mississippi Delta regions, focusing on the ways that southern Black communities articulate modes of citizenship that demand the interruption of racial capitalism and ecocide. His current research project explores how the post-Katrina privatization of neighborhood schools in low-income and working-class Black communities has fractured, but not broken, space and placemaking in Black New Orleans.

Nina Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Program in Black Studies at Swarthmore College. Consistent with her training in Africana Studies, Urban Studies, and Culture and Communication, her research interests lie in the areas of race, inequality, politics and policy, space, class, culture, stratification and mobility. She has recently published papers on political issues relative to Black experiences of upward mobility and ruminations on a sociology of Black Liberation and contributed to a documentary on the legal, economic, and social barriers to exiting street level sex work. She has presented work on the representations of race, class and place in mid century black novels, including the work of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston and a community video project on the impact of Islam on black religious, social and political life in Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley. Her forthcoming book (Temple University Press) revisits the classic works of W.E.B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier and considers meaning making processes among the black elite, its relationship to the larger black population, and its role in any projects of collective racial advancement. Her current research is a multi-method study of the impacts of the carceral state at the neighborhood level in Philadelphia, which is complemented by her teaching in State Correctional Institutions in Pennsylvania. She is a member of both the Graterford and Chester Think Tanks, two communities of incarcerated and not yet incarcerated scholars who work on issues related to the criminal legal system and provide opportunities for engagement across the physical and social barriers that prisons create. She wholeheartedly endorses every word of James Baldwin, but finds the following particularly prescient in shaping and informing her work, “The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.”

Tabitha Mustafa is a doctoral candidate in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Mustafa’s research combines insights from philosophy, law, and Africana studies to explore the perennial influence of historic colonialism, imperialism, and racism on globalized business, corporate law, and policy. Their research interests have been heavily influenced by their experiences as a Black Palestinian and as co-founder of New Orleans Palestinian Solidarity Committee—drafter of the South’s first human rights resolution in accordance with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement. Prior to attending graduate school, Mustafa was also a member of multiple Black grassroots organizing collectives and an international human rights advocate with the Center for Constitutional Rights. They hold an MS from Wharton and a BA from Tulane University.

Khadija Salim is a Seton Hall University Counseling Psychology Ph.D. student and licensed professional counselor, specializing in trauma. She is a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Trainer and Consultant, Certified Master NLP Practitioner, Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, and Certified Consulting Hypnotist. She has dedicated years to creating mental health processing and healing spaces for underserved and marginalized communities, particularly those facing historical, race-based trauma. She is passionate about decolonial healing and challenging Western mental health trauma models. Her current research centers on exploring coping mechanisms utilized by post-incarcerated Palestinian political prisoners during their time of incarceration. She is particularly interested in the construct of psychological refusal, and the embodied spirit of sumud. In alignment with the dreams of her family, community, and ancestors, Khadija draws on radical love, collective reimagination, and liberatory principles in the pursuit of healing and freedom.

Diala Shamas Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights Diala Shamas is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she works on challenging government and law enforcement abuses perpetrated under the guise of national security, both in the U.S. and abroad. Prior to joining the Center for Constitutional Rights, Diala was a Clinical Supervising Attorney and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Staff Attorney supervising the CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility) project at CUNY School of Law. Diala has represented individuals targeted by law enforcement for surveillance and harassment, or who have had immigration benefits withheld on national security grounds. She advises social justice movements and human rights advocates as they face suppression efforts at the hands of the state and private actors, in the U.S. and abroad. She is a graduate of Yale Law School.

Taurean J. Webb is Senior Fellow at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference and the former Religion, Conflict, and Peace Fellow in the Religion and Public Life Program at Harvard, where his work centered on excavating the religious and artistic histories of Afro-Arab transnational discourse. He earned his Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Racial History from Garrett Seminary (Evanston, IL), two M.A. degrees, from Northwestern University and Columbia University, respectively, in Black Studies, and his B.A. as a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Morehouse College. Webb’s research and teaching interests are in Black internationalism, Black-Palestinian transnationalism, African American religious history; Black Renaissance- and WPA-era visual arts; and visual arts of the African- and Arab- diaspora and exilic migrations. Webb’s work has been supported by Columbia University’s Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics, & Social Justice (CAARSS); Harvard University’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (RCPI); and the Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE). His writing can be found in Black Perspectives; Jadaliyya; the Journal of Middle Eastern Politics & Policy; and the Journal of Palestine Studies special edition on Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity.