Speakers

Miriam Ticktin is professor of anthropology at CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center and director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities, and, most recently, she has written about the idea of a decolonial feminist commons. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (2012) and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (2010). Her latest book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press. She is currently working on her next book, Containment and Commoning: From Bordered Worlds to Collective Life. Dr. Ticktin writes in public venues such as Truthout, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Open Democracy, and organizes with migrant social justice groups in the US and France.

Christina Leza is associate professor of anthropology and Indigenous studies at Colorado College. She is a linguistic anthropologist and Yoeme-Chicana activist scholar whose scholarship focuses on Indigenous rights and lifeways,  grassroots social justice movement, social discourse about race and ethnicity, and the U.S.-Mexico border region. Dr. Leza’s publications include “Hip Hop is Resistance: Indigeneity on the U.S.-Mexico Border” in Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America and her ethnography Divided Peoples: Policy, Activism, and Indigenous Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Her work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals and media outlets, including Semiotica, Wicazo Sa Review, Journal of the Southwest, NPR, and PBS News Weekend. She is currently writing a textbook about the linguistics of racism titled The Language of Racism and Antiracism and is lead editor of the forthcoming second edition of The Everyday Language of White Racism by Jane H. Hill (Wiley) with Jacqueline Messing and Barbra Meek. In addition to antiracist and DEI work at Colorado College, Dr. Leza is active in community work to promote equity and civic empowerment through leadership on the board of the Colorado nonprofit Citizens Project.