Anti-Colonial Democracy
Co-PI Biographies
Ricarda Hammer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. She is a historical sociologist interested in anticolonial politics. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled Citizenship and Colonial Difference: The Politics of Rights and Race across the Black Atlantic traces how anticolonial movements across the British and French Caribbean contested and reimagined metropolitan citizenship ideals. In other work, she has written about struggles for belonging in England and France, the political imaginaries of the Haitian Revolution, and Du Boisian historical sociology, which has been published in Sociological Theory, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Du Bois Review and Political Power and Social Theory, amongst other outlets.
Tianna Paschel is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California – Berkeley whose research and teaching centers on the study of racial inequality, social movements and policy. She is the author of Becoming Black Political Subjects, which tells the story of black social movements and multicultural rights in Colombia and Brazil. It is the winner of numerous awards including the Herbert Jacob Book Award of the Law and Society Association and the Barrington Moore Book Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Professor Paschel is also the co-editor of Afro-Latin@s in Movement, and is currently writing a book on race and class inequality in contemporary California. She is the co-founder of the Black Studies Collaboratory, a Mellon-funded initiative which brings together artists, activists and scholars to amplify the interdisciplinary, political and world-building work of Black Studies.
Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and co-director of the Latinx Social Science Pipeline initiative. His research focuses on race and the politics of knowledge, primarily in Latinx communities and movements. His first book, Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change, examines contemporary political struggles and meaning-making processes through which individuals and societies come to envision and sense ethnoracial demographic change. Based on his award-winning dissertation, the book received book prizes from the Culture, Population, and Latinx Sociology sections of the American Sociological Association. Along with several collaborative projects, Rodríguez-Muñiz is immersed in an oral history project on the afterlives of Puerto Rican diasporic anticolonial resistance and political repression. As part of that project, he co-directs Digitizing the Barrio, an archival project of the Chicago-based Puerto Rican Cultural Center.
Graduate Student Biographies
Franchesca Araújo is a Ph.D. candidate in African American & African Diaspora Studies. Rooted in Caribbean studies, she writes alongside political theory, disability studies, performance studies, and anti colonial traditions in both poetics and political economy. She is currently writing interdisciplinarily about how deficiency and excess are produced and ascribed onto black cultural productions and spaces as a central part of normative humanness, colonial world craft, state sovereignty/state formation, and resource deprivation—focusing on black dominicanidad (DR) and dominican cultural productions vis a vis the state, imperial power, and ‘latinidad’ at large. In her writing she is committed to affirmations of place rather than nation, and island geographies.
Annelle Maranan Garcia is a Ph.D student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Broadly, their research examines US imperialism, Filipina/x/o American diasporic activism, and racial formation. Their most recent project analyzed care work and solidarity in anti-imperialist Filipinx community organizing. Annelle holds a BA in Sociology from the University of California, Davis and a MA in Asian American Studies from San Francisco State University.
Anna Palmer is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the convergence of extractivism, (post)colonial development, and the climate crisis in the Caribbean through a qualitative and spatial lens. Her current work focuses on political decision-making and resistance to oil extraction in Guyana through content analysis and interview methods. She holds a BA in sociology from Occidental College.