Unsettled Multiculturalisms - speakers and bibliography

Barnor Hesse

Barnor Hesse is an Associate Professor of African American Studies, Political Science, and Sociology at Northwestern University.

His book, Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, is located within the Black British context and engages the meanings of multiculturalism in the West. The book introduces a conceptual language that places emphasis on distinguishing between the multicultural as a signifier of the unsettled meanings of cultural differences, and multiculturalism as the signified of attempts to “fix” their meaning in national imaginaries.

This edited collection also includes debates about multiculturalism in the contexts of globalization, the symbolism and invocation of ‘Windrush’, the making of Black and Brown diasporic identities, and what Barnor Hesse calls “multicultural transruptions” --which he sees as resurgent, irrepressible multicultural issues.

Salman Sayyid 

Salman Sayyid is a Professor of Social Theory and Decolonial Thought and is the Head of the School of Sociology and Social Policy, at the University of Leeds. He has held academic positions in London, Manchester, and Adelaide. Professor Sayyid is a political theorist, whose work engages with critical theory and the politics and culture of the Global South. Sayyid’s major publications include: A Fundamental Fear (a book despite being banned by the Malaysian government is now in its third edition), A Postcolonial People (co-edited), Thinking Through Islamophobia (co-edited with Abdoolkairm Vakil) and Recalling the Caliphate (a Turkish, Arabic and an Italian translation of this book has just recently been published). Sayyid is the founding editor of the inter-disciplinary academic journal ReOrient. He is also a frequent contributor to national and international media.

Adam Elliott-Cooper

Adam Elliott-Cooper is a research associate in applied sociology at the University of Greenwich. Adam's scholarly interests include postcolonialism, urban theory and social movements. His current research focuses on anti-racism and British policing, both on the British mainland and in Britain's colonies. His book, Black Resistance to British Policing, will be published by Manchester University Press in Spring 2021.

He sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organisation challenging state racisms and racial violence.

Monique Charles

Monique Charles is a Cultural Sociologist, Theorist and Methodologist. She developed a research method to analyse and understand music for the social science and cultural studies fields (Musicological Discourse Analysis – MDA). She developed a theory on Black music and spirituality in live performance/clubbing spaces (AmunRave Theory). She is Media Reviews Editor for the Global Hip Hop Studies Journal. She enjoys articulating Black cultural experiences. In her capacity as a Sound Therapist/Healer (specialising in tuning forks) she applies meditation and sound for healing and therapeutic purposes in her ‘I Run The Sound System’ #IRTSS practice.

Zimitri Erasmus

Zimitri Erasmus is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Wits University, Johannesburg. Her book, Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa (2017), was nominated for two awards. It brings together the full amplitude of her thinking about the ways in which ‘race’ works and it continues her long scholarly engagement with the commonly held assumption that ‘race’ is self-evident and permanent. Zimitri is the recipient of several international fellowships. Among her key interests are innovative, socially just pedagogies that engage Writing Intensive and Epistolary methods. Her most recent publication is ‘Sylvia Wynter’s Theory of the Human: Counter-, not Post-humanist’ in Theory, Culture & Society 2020, 37 (6).

Amina Easat-Dass

Dr Amina Easat-Daas is a Lecturer in Politics at De Montfort University, Leicester. Prior to this, Dr Easat-Daas worked on EU funded Counter-Islamophobia Kit project at the University of Leeds.

Dr Easat-Daas’ research interests include the study of Muslim participation in politics, French and Belgian politics and Islamophobia studies, with particular emphasis on its gendered dimensions. She regularly writes around her research areas and has recently published her monograph entitled ‘Muslim Women’s Political Participation in France and Belgium’. In her capacity as an emerging Islamophobia studies specialist, she has been invited and has presented her research findings at the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, the Carter Center (USA), and the OSCE-ODIHR among others. She is currently an Advisory Board member for the European Forum of Muslim Women and has appeared on national and international media on numerous occasions to discuss Muslim current affairs.

Mark Christian

Dr Christian is a full and tenured Professor at Lehman College - City University of New York in the Department of Africana Studies; he has a strong academic background in Africana Studies & Sociology, with a 25+ year teaching record in higher education in the US and UK. He was born and grew up in Liverpool, England; his father is of Jamaican heritage and his mother of Spanish/British heritage. He was educated in the UK (BA/PhD) and the US (MA in Africana Studies). He has lived and worked full-time in the United States since 2000. His scholarly interests are interdisciplinary within the context of Africana Studies & Historical Sociology. The books he has published to date include: Multiracial Identity: An International Perspective (Palgrave 2000); Black Identity in the 20th Century: Expressions of the UK & US African Diaspora (Hansib, 2002); Integrated but Unequal: Black Faculty in Predominately White Space (Africa World Press, 2012); The 20th Century Civil Rights Movement (Kendall Hunt 2021); and Booker T. Washington: A Life in American History (ABC-CLIO/Praeger 2021).

Shawn Sobers

Dr Shawn Naphtali Sobers is Associate Professor of Cultural Interdisciplinary Practice at University of the West of England, Bristol, and works a visual anthropologist, primarily in the mediums of filmmaking, photography and text. Topics of his work are wide ranging, including legacies of the slavery in the UK, African presence in Georgian and Victorian Britain, Ethiopian connections with the city of Bath, Rastafari language and culture, and Black cultural history. Principles relating to community media and participatory practice underpin much of his work.  As a filmmaker his work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally, and has directed and produced documentaries for BBC1, ITV and Channel 4. Shawn is co-founder of Imperial Voice Radio, based at the former home of Emperor Haile Selassie I at Fairfield House in Bath, where he is also trustee.

Denise Noble

Dr. Denise Noble was born in London, UK, of Jamaican parents. She has taught Black Studies in the UK and USA, as well as Sociology, Media & Cultural Studies, and Social Work in the UK. She has played a significant role in bringing Black Studies perspectives into the mainstream, through her teaching and scholarship as well as community activism and consulting, advancing equality and anti-racism in higher education and social work.

Dr Noble’s research focuses on the intersections and entanglements of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and nation in the cultural politics of racism and Black freedom in Britain and the African diaspora.

Denise has several scholarly publications, of which her most recent are her first sole-authored book entitled Decolonizing and Feminizing Freedom: a Caribbean Genealogy (2016), which traces the cultural and social history of Black British women’s everyday cultures of freedom in resistance to multiple patriarchies and the coloniality of British liberal racial rule.

She also has a forthcoming article co-written with Lisa Palmer, ‘Misogynoir: Anti-Blackness, Patriarchy & Refusing the Wrongness of Black Women’ in Palgrave Handbook on Race and Gender. Edited by Shirley-Anne Tate. London: Palgrave Mcmillan, (2021).

Zita Holbourne

Zita Holbourne is an award-winning human rights and equality campaigner, a trade union and community activist, author, artist, curator, poet and vocalist. Zita is the co-founder and National Chair of BARAC UK, which campaigns against austerity, racism, and injustice and for Windrush Justice and migrant and refugee rights, a founding member of BAME Lawyers for Justice, the National Vice President of PCS Union, Joint National Chair of Artists' Union England. She is the curator of the Roots Culture Identity art exhibition and collective, established in 2012 by the TUC Race Relations Committee which Zita is elected to as one of the TUC Stephen Lawrence task group recommendations to provide a platform for young black artists.

She is part of the UNESCO Coalition of Artists for the General History of Africa.

Author of the book Striving for Equality Freedom and Justice and 1 of 13 British women featured in the award-winning book Here We Stand, Women Changing the World.

She is the winner of the positive role model for race at the National Diversity Awards and of a Legacy Lifetime Achievement Award for Equality Champion.

Zita campaigns for equality freedom justice and human rights through arts and activism.

Jade Bentil

Jade Bentil is a Black feminist historian and PhD candidate in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. Her work maps the genealogies of Black women’s histories of refusal and resistance, both in Britain and throughout the Black diaspora. For her postgraduate dissertation on the Black women’s movement, she was awarded the 2017 Marion Sharples Prize at the University of Leeds. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and Prospect Magazine. Jade is currently working on her first book, Rebel Citizen, an oral history-based project focusing on the intimate recollections and experiences of Black women of African and Caribbean descent who migrated to Britain following the Second World War. Rebel Citizen will be published by Penguin Press in 2022. 

Carol Leeming

Carol Leeming was awarded MBE as poet, playwright, and contribution to Leicester arts and culture. Carol is hailed as a polymath, a UK Cultural Olympian of 2012, a multi-award winning, multi-disciplinary artist in literature, performing arts and digital media.

Carol is a part-time lecturer at De Montfort University BA (Hons) Performing Arts Course, Contemporary Theatre Module. Her other roles include: singer-songwriter, musician, composer, actor, director, curator, visual artist, and publisher.

Carol’s literary work features in The Cambridge University Companion to British Black & Asian Literature1945-2010. Carol has been published in articles and anthologies, e.g., Oxford Women’s Journal: Women Black Arts and Brixton in the 1980’s.

Carol’s contribution to 2^nd Wave Feminism, is mentioned in Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of UK Women’s Liberation Movement 1968-Present, Oxford University Press - Oxford Oral History Series. She is a Social Activist, for African Diasporic Arts & Culture: Africology, Decolonising Curriculums, Women’s Rights and Equalities.

Francesca Sobande

Dr Francesca Sobande is a lecturer in digital media studies and director of the BA Media, Journalism, and Culture programme at Cardiff University. She is author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and co-editor with Professor Akwugo Emejulu of To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (Pluto Press, 2019). Francesca tweets at @chess_ess and more information about her work is available at: francescasobande.com 

Nadine El-Enany

Nadine El-Enany teaches and researches at Birkbeck Law School and co-directs the Centre for Research on Race and Law. She is author of (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2020).

Ben Carrington

Ben Carrington is a writer and academic, widely regarded as one the world’s leading authorities on the sociology of race, politics and popular culture. He is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology and Journalism in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Prior to joining USC, Professor Carrington taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, and before that he worked at the University of Brighton in England. He has published numerous articles and essays on race, culture and politics, as well as four books, including the critically acclaimed Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora (Sage, 2010). In addition to his scholarly publications, Professor Carrington is a public sociologist who has written op-eds for publications such as The Guardian and The Huffington Post and also wrote and presented a radio documentary on the Caribbean-born public intellectual Stuart Hall.

Agostinho Pinnock

Agostinho Pinnock, a PhD Researcher at the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT): ‘Feminism, Sexual Politics and Visual Culture’, in the Department of Geography and the Environment, Loughborough University. His research traces the links between contested histories, artmaking and visuality as tools for Black identity and place-making in post-independence Jamaica. Agostinho's thesis is entitled: ‘Geographies of Struggle: History, Art and Nationhood in Post/colonial and Post-independence Jamaica, 2000-Present’. Agostinho tweets @AgostinhoP_2021.