Culture and Theory Students

Roy Cherian
Email: rcherian@uci.edu

Roy Cherian's research traces the emergence of race and the biomedical with regard to the historico-material and psycho-political dimensions of colonialization and enslavement. More precisely, by interrogating the relationship between anti-blackness and the secular, Roy's research poses the question of how Black flesh functions as an essential site for the production and refinement of knowledge and the praxis critical to the functioning of biopolitical states and the self-fashioning of its secular citizens and subjects.

DeShawn Dumas
Email: dldumas@uci.edu

DeShawn's research centers whiteness as a militarized socio-economic order and psychodermatological frame for constructions of personhood and subjective experience. His interests include aesthetics, political ontology, climate ecology and the future of policing. 
 
A contemporary conceptual painter and Visiting Faculty at San Francisco Art Institute, He received a Master of Arts degree in Fine Art and the History of Art and Design from the Pratt Institute. 

 

 

 

Malenia Friday
Email: mfriday@uci.edu

Malenia Friday is a cultural and community worker from the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Her research tends to the connective tissues between Black thought, geography, gender studies, political economy, spirituality, and the quotidian. Malenia's intellectual interests are driven by her desire to reconnect theory to practice through accessible research.

 

 

DaShané Fugate 
Email: fugated@uci.edu

DaShané’s research sits on the intersection of social justice and healing. She seeks to investigate ways Black individuals/communities create spaces for authentic embodiment, communion, and liberation. Using ethnography and critical Black feminist epistemologies, DaShané (re)imagines the relationship we have to our own bodies and with other bodies under the overarching systems of domination that assault the wellness (mind, body, soul) of Black people in the U.S. and globally.

 

Boz Garden
Email: gardenb@uci.edu

Boz Garden's interdisciplinary practice traces a social and intellectual history of literature and aesthetic practices that survey the capacity of an artwork to represent the horrors of racial slavery and/or the suffering of Blackness. Through Afropessimism, Black feminism, psychoanalysis their work more precisely interrogates how racial slavery and anti-blackness are vestibular to the master narratives of artistic practice, historiography, and theory that persistently tether the aesthetic to repair, affirmation, and appearance. They received their BFA from California Institute of the Arts and their MFA from University of California, Los Angeles. They are the Co-Director at the Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery based in Los Angeles.

 

 

Ronnese Kirton Glover
Email: rkirtong@uci.edu

Ronnese’s research concerns the long-lasting consequences of chattel slavery literacy laws and the ways in which they materialize in contemporary composition pedagogy. More specifically, her work draws critical attention to how academic language norms disadvantage Blacks students and Black vernacular knowledge, contributing to anti-Blackness in the classroom. This work employs composition theory and pedagogy, critical race theory, Black studies, literature and culture, and critical university studies. Engaging theories of racial passing, decolonization, and critical pedagogy, Ronnese’s work aims to project alternatives to anti-Blackness in educational spaces. She holds a BA and MA in Literature from California State University, Los Angeles.

 

 

Chasia Elzina Jeffries
Email: cejeffri@uci.edu

Chasia's research looks at ideas of knowledge production, community, embodiment, resistance, and credibility amongst Black women, primarily using Black Feminist Theory, dis/ability theory, poetic theory, and affect theory.

Chasia received her B.A. in Law, History, & Culture with a minor in Gender & Social Justice from the University of Southern California where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. At UCI, she is also a student in the Feminist Studies Graduate Emphasis.

 

 

akané okoshi
Email: aokoshi@uci.edu

akané’s research interrogates Black visual cultures, histories of photography, and global settler colonialisms. Their dissertation project explores how laboring bodies rebel within and against optic regimes. Their work also considers the intersection of Black expressive culture and the production of Black cartographies. 

Before coming to UCI, akané worked as a museum educator, researcher, and curriculum writer in New York City. She received her MA in interdisciplinary studies from New York University’s Experimental Humanities (XE) and a BA from Fordham University Lincoln Center.

 

 

Mariel Rowland
Email: mariel.rowland@uci.edu

Mariel’s research centers radical Black womxn educators. She studies the lives and pedagogical work of womxn who have made space in educational systems where there seemingly was none. Tracing their different methods of rupture, Mariel considers the ways in which Black feminist pedagogy moves across time and space, and in between people. With a background in art museum education, Mariel’s own practice as an educator informs her research.

 

 

Brie Smiley
Email: smileyb@uci.edu

Brie’s research seeks provocations to the questions of ontology, madness, and deviance. Using psychoanalysis, Black Critical Theory, memoir, and Black queer theory, Brie’s work constantly seeks to use slavery as a theoretic for the past, present and future of Black positionality in the world. Brie is also interested in the fallacies of multiculturalism, reform, and representation and their wider connections to antiblackness. Additionally, Brie seeks to research Brazilian archives and American archives of slavery and law, as well as the stratification of Blackness between the United States and Latin America. They received their Master’s in Women’s Studies and Bachelor’s in African American Studies from the University of Alabama.

 

 

Mackenzie Maxwell Smith
Email: mackens2@uci.edu 

Mackenzie's research examines the implications that slavery and antiblackness hold for political economy, psychoanalysis and the social forms those fields strive toward. His work has appeared in Rhizomes.

 

  

Konysha Wade
Email: konyshaw@uci.edu

Konysha’s research interests include an intersection of Black Studies and Black Theology; the oral histories of the Black church being her primary concern. Konysha also studies Black energy transferability and what it means to exist in oneness through shared experiences

Isabelle Williams
Email: icwilli1@uci.edu

Isabelle's research examines censorship in media especially “race films” and video games. Her work fixates on absence and questions of the archive. Using film historiography, psychoanalysis, political economy, Black Critical Theory, and film theory as her framework, her research questions censorship apparatuses in relationship to the status of the body, specifically the black body, within categories of family friendly entertainment.

Prior to UCI, Isabelle has worked as a K-12 educator and a case assistant for a personal injury law firm in Los Angeles. She received her Master's in Film and Media Studies from Chapman University and her Bachelor’s in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing, from University of California, Davis.