DR. MARTA ARAÚJO is a Principal Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra in Portugal, where she integrates the Research Group 'Democracy, Citizenship and Law' and lectures in the Doctoral Programmes 'Democracy in the 21st Century' and 'Human Rights in Contemporary Societies'. Marta has published internationally and is currently a member of the Editorial Board of publications on sociology, race and education in Brazil, Britain, Portugal and the United States. She has also been actively engaged in outreach activities, both with grassroots movements and with schools. Marta obtained her PhD from the University of London, Institute of Education, in 2003, with a thesis on the racialised impact of public policy, focusing on how New Labour's political initiatives in the late 1990s perpetuated racial inequality in education. Since then, she has expanded her research work to address the (re)production and challenging of Eurocentrism and racism in two complimentary lines: 1) Eurocentrism, knowledge production, history teaching, and decolonial struggles; 2) public policy, racial inequality in the education system and anti-racism. She recently published the following works: "A very ‘prudent integration’: white flight, school segregation and the depoliticization of (anti)racism", Race, Ethnicity and Education, 19, 2, 300-323, 2016; The Contours of Eurocentrism: Race, History, and Political Texts. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015 (with Silvia Maeso); Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge: Debates on History and Power in Europe and the Americas. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015 (with Silvia Maeso).

DR. GEORGE BARGANIER is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at San Francisco State University and Ambassador of International Affairs for the Prisoner’s of Conscience Committee. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley where he subsequently held a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Ethnic Studies. Prior to teaching at San Francisco State University, Dr. Barganier was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Social Change, a Research Fellow at the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice and Head Curriculum Developer at the Museum of the African Diaspora. Dr. Barganier’s research examines the dialectical interplay of criminality and internalized oppression, on the one hand, and radicalism and political resistance, on the other, in the formation of Black consciousness in the United States and around the globe. His most recent work, a comparative study of the political economy of street gangs in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and The Hague, Holland, examines the development of Black political consciousness amongst the Crips of the Netherlands and the Comando Vermelho of Brazil and the ways in which their articulations of Blackness both internalize and resist coloniality. Dr. Barganier is also currently completing a book manuscript which analyzes the psychosocial splintering impact of colonialism on Black consciousness and charts this bifurcation through an examination of the historical relationship between the Black Panther Party and the Crips and Bloods in Los Angeles.

PAWLET BROOKES MBE is the founder, CEO and artistic director of Serendipity - Institute for Black Arts and Heritage. An experienced and highly respected senior manager and producer, Brookes has been at the forefront of the development of Black arts in the UK since she was appointed Marketing Manager at the Nia Centre (Manchester) in the 90s, then Artistic Director of Peepul Centre (Leicester) and ultimately Chief Executive of Rich Mix (London).

Brookes has been the Arts Council assessor for a number of Black arts capital projects, such as Bernie Grant Arts Centre (London) and National Centre for Carnival Arts (Luton).  She has over 30 years’ experience as a cultural leader with expertise in partnership building, international programming and cultural diversity. She is the trailblazer behind several initiatives with arts and cultural organisations both in the UK and internationally.

As founder, CEO and artistic director of Serendipity, Brookes has pioneered the establishment of an annual dance festival in Leicester since 2011, Let’s Dance International Frontiers, and coordinates the high profile annual Black History Month Leicester. With Serendipity she has produced two heritage initiatives Lost Legends: 30 Years of Black History Month in Leicester (2016-2017) and Archiving the Past: Reflecting the Future (2018-2020). Under Brookes’ leadership, Serendipity was recently awarded £760k to support the development of a new project Unearthed: Forgotten Histories, one of the largest grants given by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to a Black arts and heritage organisation.

Brookes has produced several large-scale projects including two for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Ballare: To Dance with classical composer Phillip Herbert, and Follow the Light, a carnival parade as part of the Olympic torch relay in the East Midlands. In her extensive career, she has worked alongside a wide range of international artists, directors and companies from Soweto Kinch to Nina Simone, Steven Berkoff, Scottish Ballet, Geraldine O’Connor, Ballet Black, Mahogany Arts, Daksha Sheth, Phillip Herbert, Mica Paris, Akala, Gil Scott Heron, Aswad, Kyle Abraham, Germaine Acogny and Philadanco.

Brookes has edited over 18 publications focusing on Black arts, heritage including Serious About Dance – Let’s Talk (2005), Hidden Movement: Contemporary Voices of Black British Dance (2013), Reflections: Irrepressible Voices of Black British Cultural Resilience (2020), Creating Socially Engaged Art: Can Dance Change the World? (2021) and BlackInk: Arts, Heritage and Cultural Politics, a magazine published annually for Black History Month.

Brookes is currently a member of Arts Council England’s Area Council and an associate lecturer at Falmouth University, has been a speaker at a number of international conferences, including being the UK representative at a UNESCO conference in Stockholm. Brookes was a finalist for the 2009 National Regeneration and Renewals Award for Cultural Leadership and recipient of BME Leader of the year at the East Midlands Women’s Awards 2018 and One Dance UK’s Outstanding Programme Award 2018 for Let’s Dance International Frontiers. Brookes was awarded an MBE for services to the arts and cultural diversity in the 2022 New Year Honours.

DR. JEANETTE DAVIDSON, ASCW, is an Associate Professor and Director of Africana and African American Studies program at the University of Oklahoma. She completed her BA (With Honors) at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, and her MSSW and PhD in Social Work at the University of Texas at Arlington, USA. Prior to teaching at the University of Oklahoma, Dr. Davidson taught at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, and at Columbia University in New York. Dr. Davidson’s research focuses generally on topics related to race and clinical practice, and race and education and she has published widely in these areas. Her most recent grant is from the National Science Foundation for the study of success in Engineering of students from underrepresented racial groups. Her recent text, African American Studies, is published by Edinburgh University Press (distributed by Columbia University Press, NY, in the USA). Jeanette Davidson is a member of the Executive Board of the Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies and is a Board member of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century and a Board member of the National Council for Black Studies. She has served as a Consultant to Oklahoma Department of Human Services Child Welfare supervisors for twelve years. Dr. Davidson serves a number of community organizations in Oklahoma, including Public Strategies and It’s My Community, organizations that work with the most economically challenged African Americans in the state of Oklahoma. She has recently been appointed to the Board of the Women’s Resource Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

ROKHAYA DIALLO is a French journalist, writer, and award-winning filmmaker widely recognized for her work, which dismantles the barricades of racism and sexism through the promotion of equality and pluralism.
A TV host and a pundit on several French and international networks, Rokhaya is also a contributor to several newspapers and magazines. She has also directed several documentaries including the award-winning Steps To Liberty. She co-founded the INDIVISIBLES, which awards, through the ” Y’A BON AWARDS,” ceremony the “best” racist statements made by French public figures each year.
She is the author of several books, including a graphic novel, and just has published her new book Ne reste pas à ta place! She has curated an exhibition in Paris inspired by the book Afro! she co-authored with the photographer Brigitte Sombié. She has been the recipient of several awards, including the Women in Digital Feminine Communication Award from #LabcomWomen in the Generosity category created by the channel TF1 and the distinction paying homage to her work in the Journalist of the Year category 2016. In 2017 she was the only French person invited to attend the inauguration of the Obama Foundation.

DR. RAMÓN GROSFOGUEL (PhD, Sociology, Temple University, 1992) is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Fernand Braudel Center/Maison des Sciences de l‘Homme, Paris, France, 1993-94, and teaches courses in Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the US, Social Science Methods, Black Thought, Comparative Latino Migration, and Transnational Paradigms in Ethnic Studies. 

His publications includes the books Colonial Subjects: Puerto Rican Subjects in a Global Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century: Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge. Co-edited with Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez (New York: Praeger, 2002); and dozens of articles. A selected representation includes: "Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States" (with Anna Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez and Brice Mielants), in Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States: Essays on Incorporation, Identity and Citizenship (2002), co-edited with Eric Mileants and Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez; "Latinos and Decolonization of the US Empire in the 21st Century." Social Science Information 47(4) (2009):605-22; "World-System Analysis and Postcolonial Studies: A Call for Dialogue from the 'Coloniality of Power‘ Approach", in Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley, eds., The Postcolonial and the Global. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 94-104; "The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political Economy Paradigms." Cultural Studies 21(2-3) (2007):211-23; "The Long-Durée: Entanglement Between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern-Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System." Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge V(1):Fall 2006.

DR. CAMILLA HAWTHORNE is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. A critical human geographer, Hawthorne studies the racial politics of migration and citizenship, with a focus on the Black Mediterranean and Italy. She is the author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022), translated into Italian as Razza e cittadinanza. Frontiere contese e contestate nel Mediterraneo nero (Astarte Edizioni, 2023), and co-editor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023), and Heartbreak and Other Geographies: Collected Works of Katherine McKittrick (University of Minnesota Press, 2026). In 2020, Hawthorne was named a "Woman of the Year" by Italy's most widely-read newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, and in 2024-2025 she was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

DR. BARON KELLY is an Professor and Director of the African American Theatre program at the University of Louisville. Dr. Kelly has the distinction of being a four-time Fulbright Scholar and an elected member of the National Theatre Conference. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a diploma from London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and an MFA in Acting from California State University Long Beach. He has traveled extensively as a Cultural Specialist for the United States Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs teaching and lecturing on the theatre in Russia; Scandinavia; Africa; Europe; and Asia. He has been a fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research. Currently, he serves on the boards of both the Comparative Drama Conference and Stanislavsky Institute. He is currently under contract to Focus Publishing for his forthcoming book, An Actor’s Task: Engaging the Senses. Acting assignments include Broadway (Salome and Electra); Royal National Theatre of Great Britain; Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada; Edinburgh Theatre Festival; the Oregon, Utah, Dallas Fort Worth, California Shakespeare Festivals; Actors Theatre of Louisville; The Guthrie; San Diego’s Old Globe; Shakespeare Theatre, Washington D.C.; Mark Taper Forum; South Coast Repertory; McCarter Theatre. Film and television credits include featured roles in Bird, A Day Without a Mexican, Loving, Frasier, The Innocent, and Majority Rule.

DR. KWAME NIMAKO is the founder and director of the Black Europe Summer School (BESS) based in Amsterdam since 2007. He holds degrees in sociology and a PhD in economics from the University of Amsterdam where he also taught International Relations in the Department of Political Sciences (1992-2013 and Race and Ethnic Relations at the Centre for Race and Ethnic Studies (1986- 1991). He held visiting professor positions in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley (Spring 2018 and 2012-2015) and at the University of Suriname (2011) and has also given lectures at universities, conferences and organizations in the UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, South Africa and Sweden.

Dr. Nimako has consulted with several private and public institutions including the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy (NiNsee) in Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Municipal Council, and the Dutch Ministry of Home Affairs. He was the Principal Research Consultant for Focus Consultancy Ltd (UK) (1996-1997) on the Migrants in Europe Project commissioned by the General-Secretariat of the 70 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States (in Brussels). He is the author or co-author of more than thirty books, reports and guidebooks, on economic development, ethnic relations, social policy, urban renewal, and migration.

His most recent book (in English) is The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (with Glenn Willemsen) (London, Pluto Press, 2011). Among his recent book chapters are: ‘The Roads, the Belt, and the contemporary international political-economic system’; In: The Belt and Road Initiative in Asia, Africa, and Europe (Routledge 2023); Editors, David Arase and Pedro Amakasu Raposo), pp224-238; ‘Lost and Found: sovereignties and state formations in Africa and Asia’, In: Routledge Handbook of Africa-Asia Relations, edited by Pedro Miguel Amakasu Raposo de Medeiros Carvalho, David Arase and Scarlett Cornelissen (Routledge: London 2018); Black Europe and a Contested European Union; In: The Open Veins of the Postcolonial: Afrodescendants and Racism, edited by Iolanda Evora and Inocencia Mata (Tagus Press, Dartmouth, 2022); Araújo, Marta; Nimako, Kwame (2022), Mobilizing History: Racism, Enslavement and Public Debate in Contemporary Europe, in Shirley Anne Tate and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Race and Gender. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 449-466.

He is currently writing a book with Stephen Small entitled Public History, Museums and Collective Memory of slavery and its legacies in England and The Netherlands.

DR. MARGARET AMAKA OHIA-NOWAK is an Assistant Professor of language and linguistics, discourse and media studies at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at the Marie Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland. Her focus is on race and racism in public discourse in Poland, anti-Black racist discourses, and media representations of Black ethnic minorities in Poland. Margaret received her PhD in Linguistics on the representations of race in Polish media discourse from the University of Wroclaw (2015). She graduated from the Black Europe Summer School at Vrije University in Amsterdam (2010). She was a Fulbright scholar at the University of California at Berkeley (2012-2014). She was a Visiting Scholar at City University London (2012) and University of Amsterdam (2010-2011). She was a National Science Centre Fellow (2011-2014). She recently co-authored the report on lived experiences of Africans and Afro-descendant people in Poland (publication in Polish). She has worked extensively as a racial justice and Diversity, Equity and Belonging expert and consultant. She is an international human rights activist and a co-founder and Board Member of the Alliance for Black Justice in Poland, Board Member of the Association for Polish People of African Descent.

DR. OLIVETTE OTELE is a Distinguished Research Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at SOAS, University of London. Her area of research is colonial, post-colonial history and memory studies. Otele holds a Ph.D. in History from Université Paris La Sorbonne, France and received an honorary doctorate in Law from Concordia University in Canada in 2022. She is a Fellow and former Vice President of the Royal Historical Society. She was a judge of the International Man Booker Prize, has written numerous scholarly papers and books, and she is also a regular contributor to the press, television and radio programmes in Britain, the US and France. Otele is broadcaster and a consultant for films and documentaries such as Chevalier in Cinema in 2023 and African Queens airing on Netflix (2023). Her latest books include an edited volume, Post-Conflict Memorialization: Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies (2021) and African Europeans: an Untold History (2020). She works with policy makers and other institutions to engage with the histories of colonial slavery and restorative justice strategies (See Welsh Government Report and the Guardian Newspapers project Cotton Capital).

DR. STEPHEN SMALL is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and former Associate Director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was appointed “Extraordinary Professor for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy” at the University of Amsterdam (from September 1, 2010). Born and raised in Liverpool, England, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, his MSc. at the University of Bristol, and his BA at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He was a Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute (1980-1984), Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, (1988-1992), and Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leicester (1992-1995). He also taught at the University of Warwick (1991). He was Guest Curator at the Merseyside Maritime Museum’s Atlantic Slave Trade Gallery (now the International Slavery Museum) that opened in 1994. He has worked closely with the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy (Ninsee), since 2006. He has been actively involved in Black organizations and community education centres in Britain, since the 1970s, and continues to contribute to their activities. He was director of the University of California Education Abroad Program in Bordeaux, 2002-2004; and Director of the UC, Berkeley summer school program in Brazil, 2001-2005. 

Dr. Small has undertaken research and published on issues of the Black presence and the African Diaspora in Europe, the United States and the Caribbean for more than 25 years; and on issues to do with museums, public history and collective memory for 20 years. His recent books include Black Europe and the African Diaspora (co-edited with Darlene Clark Hine and Trica Daniel Keaton, University of Illinois Press, 2009); Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (with Jennifer L Eichstedt, Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); Race and Power: Global Racism in the 21st Century (with Gargi Bhattacharyya and John Gabriel, Routledge, 2002); Racialised Barriers: Black People in the United States and England in the 1980s (Routledge, 1994). He is currently working on two projects: the first is a book on “21st century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism” in Louisiana, USA, which explores representations of slavery and slave cabins at contemporary heritage tourism locations; the second is a research project on “Public History, Museums and African Diasporic Memory in England and The Netherlands” (with Kwame Nimako).

DR. MELISSA F. WEINER (Ph.D, Sociology, University of Minnesota; BA & BS in Sociology and Journalism, Boston University) participated in the 2012 Black Europe Summer School as a student and is looking forward to returning as faculty. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. She has also taught at Quinnipiac University and was affiliated with the NiNsee, the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy, and Ercomer, the European Research Center on Migration and Ethnic Relations at Utrecht University. 

Weiner’s research and teaching focuses on racial identity formation and racializing mechanisms in the context of education in the United States, The Netherlands, and from a global perspective. Weiner is currently analyzing data collected during her fieldwork in The Netherlands and will publish findings related to depictions of slavery and multiculturalism in Dutch primary school history textbooks and norms and practices privileging whiteness in a diverse Dutch primary school classroom. Her book, Power, Protest, and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City (Rutgers, 2010) revealed how educational structures maintained racial identities and inequalities in the face of significant protests to alleviate race-based resource and curricular inequalities. “Towards a Global Critical Race Theory” (Sociology Compass, 2012) argues that international scholars must use empirical indicators to assess whether racializing phenomena occur in nations where race is denied. Her work has also appeared in Social Problems, The Sociological Quarterly, Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change and multiple edited volumes. 

Weiner has long integrated her academic work in race and education with political action. While in graduate school in Minnesota, she worked on numerous political and social justice campaigns with, among others, the Institute on Race and Poverty (Law School, University of Minnesota), Progressive Minnesota (currently MNPAC), and as a policy writer for a winning city councilman's campaign. In addition to teaching and researching these issues, Weiner founded and runs an NGO, Brighter World Books, dedicated to working with low-income African schools in South Africa to fill their libraries with the books they need. She currently works with the Worcester, MA chapter of the Student Immigrant Movement to promote legislation and educational opportunities for undocumented immigrant youth.