PhD Alumni Listing

• Research Interests: Visual Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, Feminist Theory, Media Studies
• Education: B.A., American Studies and Certificate in LGBT Studies, University of Maryland, College Park
• Job Placement: Director of Knowledge Power, Douglass College, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
• Committee: Judy Gerson, Ethel Brooks, Sylvia Chan-Malik, Tina Campt, The Clare Tow and Ann Whitney Olin Professor at Barnard
• Dissertation: "Bodies of Evidence: The Image, the Flesh, and the Modern Crisis of the Human".

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• Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Research Interests: Affect/Emotion; Feminist Geographies; Critical Urban Studies; Social Movements, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Gulf Region, Blogs and Social Media, Public/Privat(ized) Spaces, Femininities/Masculinities, Geographies of Risk and Activism
• Education: B.A. in Journalism, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain, 2001 M.A. in European Studies, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany, 2005 M.A. in Political Analysis, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain, 2011
• Committee: Zakia Salime, Chair; Judith Gerson, Mary Hawkesworth, Frances Hasso
• RU Core Link: https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/60157/
• Dissertation: “Risk-Taking Activism: Counter-Spaces Against Public Sexual Violence in Post-January 25 Egypt”

• Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies
• Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Research Interests: Black girlhood; Black feminist theory; Visual/Media studies; Digital humanities
• Education: 2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Rutgers University; 2009, Master of Liberal Arts, University of Richmond; 2007, Bachelor of Arts, North Carolina A&T State University
• Job Placement: Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies, Melvin and Rosalind Jacobs University Endowed Fellow in the Humanities, Penn State University
• Webpage: http://english.la.psu.edu/faculty-staff/apw5505
• Committee: Brittney Cooper, Chair; Nikol Alexander-Floyd, Jack Bratich; Judith Gerson
• Dissertation: "To Be Girl, Digital, and Black: Black Girls' Digital Media Production as Cultural Discourse"
• Abstract URL: https://search.proquest.com/docview/2306499419

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• Adjunct Faculty, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University
• Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Research Interests: Trauma & somatics; race & histories of whiteness; theories & practices of care; critical approaches to health & medicine; peer recovery & mutual aid.
• Education: Ph. D. (with distinction), 2019 -- Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University M.A., 2012-- Humanities & Social Thought, New York University B.A., 2007-- English & American Studies, Mount Holyoke College
• Job Placement: Researcher at Historic New England
• Webpage: https://rutgers.academia.edu/LindseyWhitmore
• Committee: Decena, Carlos (chair); Schuller, Kyla (co-chair); Puar, Jasbir (internal member); Chan-Malik, Sylvia (internal member); Diedrich, Lisa (outside member)
• RU Core Link: https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/60096/
• Dissertation: “Ecologies of Care: Whiteness, Clinical Power, and Post-Opioid Futures”

BIO

Lindsey Whitmore is a writer, educator, researcher, and facilitator whose work seeks to locate embedded histories of extractive capitalism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism in contemporary U.S. systems and practices of care. With over 10 years of experience working alongside peer-to-peer, community-based recovery communities in Western Massachusetts, Lindsey's work centers critical analyses of U.S. clinical treatment systems offered by those with lived experience and elaborates “from the ground up” strategies for enacting systemic transformations in how we respond to harm.

The recipient of Rutgers University’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education, Lindsey is also a passionate educator with nearly a decade of experience facilitating rigorous online and classroom-based higher education experiences for diverse student bodies. They currently teach classes in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, as well as courses in collaboration with Rutgers’ Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities (CWAH). Lindsey has also received funding to develop and teach hybrid (in-person and online) courses at Rutgers, and they have supported faculty work in the Online Certificate Program in Women’s Global Health Leadership.

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• Researcher and Instructor
• Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Research Interests: Gender and politics; populism; feminist organizations; gender equality policies; local politics.
• Education: 2019, PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University; 2012, MA in Women’s and Gender Studies, Utrecht University (Netherlands) and University of Hull (United Kingdom); 2009, BA in Sociology, Complutense University of Madrid (Spain)
• Job Placement: Juan de la Cierva Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Political and Administrative Sciences, Complutense University of Madrid
• Committee: Prof. Carlos Decena (chair), Prof. Mary Hawkesworth, Prof. Judith Gerson, and Prof. Emanuela Lombardo (outside member).
• RU Core Link: https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/61704
• Dissertation: Tensions between Populism and Feminist Politics: Reproduction of a Masculine Party Culture in Podemos

• Job Placement: Racial Justice Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for a Just Society, Columbia University Center for Critical Thought
• Committee: Fleetwood, Nicole (chair); Decena, Carlos (internal member); Schuller, Kyla (internal member); Malik, Sylvia Chan (internal member); Halberstam, Jack (outside member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
• RU Core Link: https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/65783/
• Dissertation: "Abolitionist entanglement: ending the grammars of capture"

• Job Placement: Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Carter Woodson Institute, University of Virginia
• Committee: Cooper, Brittney C. (chair); Busia, Abena P.A. (internal member); Decena, Carlos U. (internal member); Stephens, Michelle A. (internal member); Allen, Jafari (outside member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
• RU Core Link: https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/65976/
• Dissertation: "Afrekete's Room: Mapping the Shape of Space and Narrative in Black Queer Women's Writing"

• Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Research Interests: African American women's studies, African American feminism and cultural studies. Black feminism and cinema.
• Committee: Brooks, Ethel (chair); Clarke, Cheryl (internal member); Cooper, Brittney (internal member); White, E. Frances (outside member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
• RU Core Link: https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/65320/
• Dissertation: "How Black Feminism Takes Place: Intergenerational Activism and Cultural Production in the New Millennium"

• Job Placement: Assistant Professor, Global Studies and Gender, Race, and Sexuality Studies, Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Webpage: https://ntanjeem.org/
• Committee: Hawkesworth, Mary (chair), Decena, Carlos; Rodgers, Yana; Brooks, Ethel; Siddiqi, Dina (outside member).
• Dissertation: “Can Workers of the World Unite?” A multi-sited ethnography of transnational labor organizing across the apparel commodity network.

Bio

Nafisa Tanjeem is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies and Gender, Race, and Sexuality Studies at Lesley University. She served as a Visiting Scholar at the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program of Northeastern University in the academic year 2020-21.

Nafisa’s research and teaching interests include transnational, postcolonial, and decolonial feminisms; critical race theory; globalization and feminist politics; critical community engagement; nonprofit industrial complex; critical university studies; and transnational social justice movements with a specific focus on the United States and South Asia.

Nafisa’s current book project examines transnational labor activism and activist discourses developed in relation to the deadliest garment industrial disaster in the human history – the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, a factory building housing five garment factories in Savar, Bangladesh. Drawing on two-year-long physical and digital ethnographic observations, her project reveals how creative transnational feminist praxis in virtual and physical organizing spaces can uncover histories and struggles of women workers and grassroots labor organizers, thereby transcending benevolent regimes of neoliberal transnational labor organizing.

Before joining Lesley, Nafisa taught at Rutgers University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Dhaka. She has been actively involved in community organizing and social justice activism. As Community Organizer of Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA), she designed and implemented local campaigns aimed at promoting poverty reduction, gender equity, and youth engagement among South Asian immigrant communities in Toronto, Canada. She was also an organizer of United Students Against Sweatshops in the USA and “Meye” (Women) network in Bangladesh.

Nafisa holds a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University in the USA, an M.A. in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto in Canada, and a B.S.S in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes transnational labor activism and activist discourses developed in relation to the deadliest garment industrial disaster in the human history - the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, a factory building housing five garment factories in Savar, Bangladesh. The project takes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach, involving two-year-long physical and digital ethnographic observation and interviews with Bangladeshi women garment workers, labor rights activists, researchers, and policymakers in Bangladesh and the United States. The research asks what it means for grassroots labor organizers in the Global South, who are often restricted by national borders and neoliberal socio-economic-political forces, to engage in transnational solidarity building. It specifically examines why some grassroots organizing initiatives in the Global South can engage in solidarity building with transnational allies while others do not gain such access. Drawing on the case study of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh - a transnational governance structure that aspired to ensure safety and security for Bangladeshi garment workers after the Rana Plaza collapse, the dissertation argues that the post-Rana Plaza transnational collaboration between workers and labor organizers in the Global North and the South reproduces a neoliberal attention economy where gendered and racialized Southern workers receive attention from their Northern allies only if they speak the preferred language, subscribe for a preferred politics, and mobilize donor funds in a preferred way. The ethnographic fieldwork documents how attention from the Northern allies often comes at the cost of losing attention from Southern workers and activists. Therefore, the neoliberal attention economy offers the impossible choice between engaging in transnational collaboration while losing material impact on the ground and focusing on grounded struggles while losing transnational allies.

• NU Academic Track Fellow (NUAcT)
• Department: The School of Geography, Politics and Sociology
• Job Placement: Academic Track Fellow in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology, Newcastle University
• Webpage: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/gps/staff/profile/stephenseely.html#background
• Committee: Cornell, Drucilla (chair); Grosz, Elizabeth (co-chair); Cohen, Ed (internal member); Fermon, Nicole (outside member)
• Dissertation: "A world of difference"

Bio

Stephen graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with degrees in English and Gender and Women's Studies. His dissertation project explores the relationship between sex/uality and technicity in philosophy, psychoanalysis, the biological and techno-sciences, and science fiction. In general, Stephen's work seeks to think through the reconfigurations of life, sex, and spirit/psyche wrought by contemporary forms of information and biocapitalism, technoscience, and neoliberal governmentality. In addition to his dissertation, there are currently two main ongoing projects through which this work takes shape. The first is a collaboration with Drucilla Cornell rethinking the relationship between revolution, spirituality, and sexual ethics as they have been configured in queer and feminist theory and in various revolutionary movements (especially Iran and South Africa). Their article "There’s Nothing Revolutionary About a Blowjob" is forthcoming in Social Text, and they are currently working on a book. The second project develops the concept of psychecologies which couples the framework of ecosophy” (ecological philosophy, philosophical ecology) in Félix Guattari’s writings with a more capacious understanding of psyche as mind-spirit-life-ghost in order to widen the individualistic frame of contemporary psychology by centralizing the concern for both the collective and environmental dimensions of life. The notion of psychecology then shifts psychology from the study of the (individual) mind to a consideration of a series of inter-linked ecosystems (mental, collective, environmental), as well as thinks critically about what care practices are necessary to maintain a balance among these systems at varying scales, from the individual to the global. Additionally, he has published work on queer becoming, affect theory, race and psychoanalysis, sexual difference, and biophilosophy.

Abstract

This dissertation is an exploration of the co-imbrications of Being, life, and sex: of the sexuate dimensions of Being (or, perhaps better put: of living) and of the ontological (or, perhaps better put: vital) dimensions of sex. It asks: What is the relationship between Being and living? Does Being, or life, have (a) sex? What is the, often implicit, ontology of life and sex that prevails in feminist and queer theory and politics? And what questions and practices might another thinking of Being, life, and sex enable? Its goal is to outline a feminist and queer theory of sexuation as a mode of individuation and relation that moves beyond the ontology of the individual that dominates Euro-American philosophy (and therefore most feminist and queer theory): rather than taking the individual as a starting point and analyzing sexuality as a form of identity, subjectivity, or interaction between individuals, it thinks sexuation as a vital ontological process of individuation and relation at work at a number of “levels” from the physico-chemical to the ecological, technological, artistic, and political. Its central argument is that, as a mode of individuation, sexuation consists simultaneously of differentiation and relation and that this is a process given by Being, or life, “itself.” As such, it thinks Being, or life, as always already more-than-one. This theory of sexuation, then, is a theory of life’s Being, or becoming, that insists on sexual difference as an ineradicable and ontological force while also insisting on its open-endedness. We do not know what forms of sexuation life may bring, or what modes of life sexuation may bring, but the becomings of life and sex take place in and through one another. Understanding sexuation this way, it suggests, cuts across many ongoing debates in feminist, queer, and trans theory and highlights unexplored areas of transdisciplinary research and feminist inquiry. If there is no dimension of Being, or life, at which the isolated individual exists and if there is no dimension of Being, or life, at which sexuation is not at play, then there is no dimension that does not call for feminist and queer analysis.