The Lowcountry is a region shaped by two histories: slavery and the tidal flow of water. With four consecutive years of hurricanes and 89 days of tidal flooding in Charleston in 2019, the Lowcountry’s relationship with the ebb and flow of the tides has become central in a new way, as a harbinger of future destruction. As local governments forge new tidal relations by building and adapting infrastructure, the preservation of antebellum heritage landscapes and everyday flooding of Black communities reveal enduring racial geographies. While officials in city meetings argue that “water knows no boundaries,” residents understand that the infrastructures underpinning the dispersal and management of floodwater enact a racialized politics of emplacement, inclusion, and exclusion.

Brian’s research is situated in this and other spaces where global climate change and water infrastructure become entangled with what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of slavery. His dissertation offers new formulations of coastal resiliency and provides empirical support for local environmental justice organizations in their urgent claims for reparative flood mitigation.

Brian’s research is based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative community-led research with Charleston flood activist groups.

He received his B.A. in Anthropology and Philosophy from the Honors College at the University of Georgia, and his M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Elan’s dissertation, “Contemporary Neshnabék Territoriality: A Study of Connections and Obligations to Waters, Lands, and Nonhuman Relatives,” analyzes how obligations to nonhuman relatives, popularly categorized as “natural resources,” are actively practiced by Potawatomi and Ojibwe nations. In this multi-sited ethnography, Elan collaborated and conducted ethnographic research with four sovereign Neshnabék nations: the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi, the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, and the White Earth Nation (Ojibwe).

By studying these nations’ obligations to nonhuman relatives alongside their present-day territorial claims, his dissertation is comprised of relational analyses of environmental ethics across Neshnabék nations, reservations, and homelands typically perceived as isolated from one another. Elan studies how these nations navigate emerging technologies, legal approaches, and U.S.-sponsored ecological restoration projects while maintaining specific ethical commitments. His research investigates Potawatomi and Ojibwe nations’ efforts to restore wild rice, rehabilitate eagles and sturgeon, protect bodies of water, and contest infrastructure projects that threaten the health and livelihoods of their human and nonhuman kin. This ethnographic research was conducted with the consent and approval of these nations’ respective tribal councils and/or research review boards.

As the Research Fellow in Geography and Cartography at the Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s Cultural Heritage Center, he is currently utilizing ArcGIS software to spatially map historic Potawatomi homelands, presences, inter-species relational networks, and place names in Indiana. The resulting maps are the basis for an article he recently authored for the Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community journal.

His dissertation research has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP), the Mellon Foundation, the University of Minnesota Diversity of Views & Experiences (DOVE) Fellowship, and the Beverly & Richard Fink Summer Research Fellowship. He recently accepted the Charles Eastman Fellowship at Dartmouth College, which he will begin in the fall of 2021. In 2016, he received his B.A. in Native/Indigenous Studies (Ethnicity & Race Studies) from Columbia College, Columbia University, where he served as Co-President of the Native American Council and was a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF).

Approaching incarceration from the perspective of families with incarcerated members de-centers the presumptively male subject of carceral violence and instead shows us the networks through which penal harm are transmitted across intimate relationships and broader communities. It also highlights the ways that discourses of family failure and dysfunction, ubiquitous in the criminal justice system, have positioned black families as responsible for the incarceration of their own kin.

His commitments to abolitionist movements ground Sam’s work. Originally from the UK, Sam studied anthropology at UCL before moving to the US to complete his dissertation at Stanford.

An experienced teacher and organizer, his work has been supported by the Center for Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and others.

His dissertation, Uncle Sam’s Slaves: Slavery in the United States Army 1797-1865, reveals the history of military slaves in the first decades of the American Republic. The dissertation argues that thousands of enslaved persons served as officers’ servants, becoming an integral part of the U.S. Army.

By probing the history of military slaves, Hamdani demonstrates how the “Old Army,” the key instrument of statecraft in the early United States, evolved as a national institution that condoned and promoted slavery in its ranks. The dissertation investigates the origins of slavery within the army, the political economy of military slavery as well as the legal, fiscal, and violent mechanisms that sustained it, and the ways in which it influenced the lives of slaves and soldiers. It emphasizes the national dimension of slavery and the government’s commitment to it, by unearthing the role of previously unregarded men and women in the nation’s military history and their involuntary participation in the building of an American Continental Empire.

Originally from Ashdod, Israel, Yoav graduated from Tel-Aviv University’s Multidisciplinary Honors B.A. Program in Humanities and Arts. He started his studies at Columbia University in 2015.

Sabrina’s dissertation will deepen our understanding of the state’s social control capacity vis-à-vis its immigration law and enforcement apparatus. Additionally, executive branch court proceedings are understudied in the literature (immigration courts are located within the U.S. Department of Justice). Providing an interior account of how immigration court proceedings operate as modes of state social control is an important step towards understanding how courts throughout the federal executive branch—around 450 in total—extend the state’s social control capacity deeper into our lives.

Sabrina has a master’s degree in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School and a JD from Yale Law School.  Before beginning graduate school, Sabrina practiced law for a number of years.  Sabrina is the proud daughter of Haitian immigrants and mother to three young children.  She lives in New York City.