Angela Howell is an Assistant Professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Howell joined the faculty in 2007. At Morgan State, Dr. Howell is the only anthropologist and the Coordinator of the Anthropology Concentration. Her research interests are African American identity, youth culture, social constructions of reality, religious expression, race, ethnicity and gender, educational institutions, and literacy.

Dawn-Elissa Fischer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University, where she teaches courses on black popular culture, digital research design and visual ethnography. Dr. Fischer has worked on a number of different community-based campaigns using hip hop to address issues of voter disenfranchisement, gender based violence, literacy and the digital divide.

Aimee Meredith Cox is a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of performance and African and African American Studies. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan where she also held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for the Education of Women. Dr. Cox’s research and teaching interests include expressive culture and performance; urban youth culture; public anthropology; Black girlhood and Black feminist theory. She is currently completing a book entitled, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship in Post-Industrial Detroit.

Dana-Ain Davis is an Associate Professor in the Queens College Extension Center, where she is also the Associate Chair. She is the author of Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform (SUNY, 2006) and several articles that focus on the impact of welfare reform and neoliberalism. Davis’s current research is in the United States and focuses on race, gender, poverty, reproductive health, community organizing, and the politics of activist anthropology.

Kimberly Eison Simmons is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Her research interests include racialization processes, women’s organizations and activism, identity formation and the cultural construction of race, color, and gender in the Dominican Republic, the United States, and throughout African Diaspora communities. She is the author of Reconstructing Racial Identities and the African Past in the Dominican Republic (University Press of Florida, 2009).

Raymond Codrington is Senior Research Associate at the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change. He supervises projects that address structural racism in domestic and international contexts. Prior to joining the Aspen Institute, Codrington was the Founding Director of the Julian C. Dixon Institute for Cultural Studies and Assistant Curator in the Department of Anthropology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He also held the positions of Sandy Boyd Postdoctoral Fellow at the Field Museum’s Center for Cultural Understanding and Change and Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Purchase.