Orisanmi Burton is a doctoral student in Social Anthropology at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. His research interests include youth culture, masculinity, social movements, political economy, and technology as they relate to the African diaspora. As a trained librarian he brings to the discipline a commitment to presenting and preserving counter-hegemonic narratives. Orisanmi has developed rites of passage programming at The Brotherhood/Sister Sol in Harlem, led a youth-ethnography project in rural Brazil, and continues to collect oral histories along internal slave routes in Ghana. He is currently serving as an archivist for a new digital photo archive of the Association of Black Anthropologists.

Michael Ralph is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Michael’s scholarship centers on risk, injury, liability, citizenship and sovereignty in Senegal, the United States and Eritrea. Michael has published in Souls, Social Text, Public Culture, South Atlantic Quarterly, Journal of the History of Sport, and Transforming Anthropology. He is an Associate Editor of Transforming Anthropology, as well as a member of the Social Text Editorial Collective and the Editorial Boards of Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Sport in Society and Disability Studies Quarterly.

Oneka LaBennett is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, and Women’s Studies at Fordham University. She is also Research Director of the Bronx African American History Project   (BAAHP). Her teaching focuses on African Diasporic identities, popular youth culture, and West Indian migration. Dr. LaBennett is the author of She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn (NYU Press 2011), and co-editor of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (UC Press forthcoming).

Karen G. Williams is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her research interests include the criminal justice system, governance, race/racism(s), social stratification, and medical anthropology. Williams’ current research project is focused in the United States and examines state-wide prisoner reentry and risk reduction initiatives in Missouri and Kansas. She is the co-author of Study Guide for Let Nobody Turn Us Around (Rowan & Littlefield, 2009). Williams received her MA in Performance Studies from New York University and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Melanie E. L. Bush is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Adelphi University. She has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and presented at a range of national conferences particularly in the fields of sociology and anthropology, and in 2003 she was a prize winner of the Praxis Award, given by the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists for outstanding achievement in translating knowledge into action in addressing contemporary social problems.

Dr. Barnes is Assistant Professor in Afro-American Studies at Smith College. She currently specializes in race, class, and gender dynamics in African American families as they are experienced in the U.S. political economy, race and identity formation across the African Diaspora, and black women’s articulations of feminism. Her research and publications have focused on cultural shifts in black women’s perceptions of career and family in the U.S. and abroad. She is currently working on a manuscript that explores black women’s career and family gender strategies as they are rooted in class position and racial identity.

Aimee Meredith Cox is a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of Performance and African and African American Studies. She received her Ph.D. 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.

Alisha R. Winn is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Fayetteville State University. Her recent research focused on the social and cultural dynamics of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, one of the largest, most successful African American financial institutions in the twentieth century. Her research interests include: heritage preservation, ethnicity, identity, class, oral narratives, museum studies,and the impact that learning Black history from community elders instead of textbooks has on youth.