Speaker and Moderators

Olad Aden

After ending his very successful DJ career in Hannover, Germany’s club scene and joining his family in the United States at the tender age of 19, Olad has worked with and for people in difficult living conditions. First in adult Psychiatric Services and later with at risk adolescents. It was here that Olad developed a sense of community activism. In 2003 Olad immigrated to Berlin, Germany where he has been working with Gangway e.V. ever since. In this capacity Olad has initiated several high profile projects.

Joshua Kwesi Aikins

is a political scientist and PhD candidate at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology. He studied at Freie Universität Berlin and University of Ghana. His research interests include the interaction between western-style and indigenous political institutions in Ghana, post- and decolonial perspectives on ‘development’, cultural and political representation of the African Diaspora, coloniality and the politics of memory in Germany as well as Critical Whiteness Studies. As a member of the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (Initiative of Black People in Germany) as well as the Straßeninitiative he is involved in the ongoing struggle for a decolonial renaming of Berlin streets and a shift from colonial to anti- and decolonial commemoration in and beyond the German capital.

Biplab Basu

A critical Marxist, Biplab Basu was involved in the independent trade union movement in the eastern part of India. In 1997 he came to Germany. He got involved in refugee rights movement, worked for German Red Cross with unaccompanied minor refugee boys in the 80s. In the 90s he joined the PDS in the Berlin state legislature as a research assistant for asylum/migration/racism issues. In 1988/89 the Anti-racist Initiative (ARI) was founded in Berlin. He joined it shortly afterwards and remained active there for many years and out of which many anti-racist activities and networks grew up. Finally, with some of his best activist friends he founded ReachOut and subsequently KOP- campaign for the victims of racist police violence and racial discrimination.

Sanchita Basu

Sanchita Basu studied Pedagogic, psychology and sociology at the Technical University, Berlin and is trained in transcultural therapy and multicultural counselling. Since 25 years she is involved in different activities against structural and institutional racism and she is organised in many antiracist Groups. She works for ReachOut, a counselling centre for victims of racism, right wing violence and anti-Semitism as an educationist

Cengiz Barskanmaz

Cengiz Barskanmaz is a legal scholar with a special focus on Critical Race Theory. Currently he is finalizing his PhD-Project about “Law against Racism - Toward a Suitable Understanding of Racism”. His research fields include Constitutional and Non-Discrimination Law, Human Rights,

Critical Race Theory, Post-Colonialism, Intersectionality. His latest publication concerns the use of the concept “race” in the German Basic Law as well the ideological construction called “The German Exceptionalism”. He is also a founding member of the Critical Race Theory Europe. In his function as Consultant for the Open Society Justice Initiative he is working on ethnic segregation in the educational system in Berlin. Cengiz is a committed transnational anti-racist activist with focus on the Kurdish and the Palestinian Question.

Manuela Boatcă

Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin. She studied English and German philology at the Universities of Bucharest, Bonn, and Cologne, and Sociology at the Catholic University of Eichstätt, Boston College, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Eichstätt in 2002 and was Visiting Professor of Sociology at IUPERJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2007-2008. Her research interests include world-systems analysis, sociology of development, gender and violence research, and postcolonial studies in historical-comparative perspective, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe and Latin America. She is author of “From Neoevolutionism to World-Systems Analysis. The Romanian Theory of ‘Forms without Substance’ in Light of Modern Debates on Social Change”, 2003, and co-editor of “Decolonizing European Sociology. Transdisciplinary Approaches“ (with Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez and Sérgio Costa), Aldershot: Ashgate 2010, as well as of “Global, multiple and postcolonial modernities” (with Willfried Spohn), Munich 2010. From Neoevolutionism to World-Systems Analysis. She is currently completing a monograph on a postcolonial perspective on global inequalities.

Angela Davis (Internet support note)

Angela Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author. Davis emerged as a nationally prominent activist and radical in the 1960s, as a leader of the Communist Party USA and Black Panther Party, and through her association with the Civil Rights Movement. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of “Critical Resistance”, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is the former director of the university’s Feminist Studies department.[2] Her research interests are in feminism, African American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music and social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons.

Isabel Dean

studied Cultural Anthropology and Politics at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. She wrote her master thesis about Western representations of Africa in Ethnological Museums and examined closer the exhibition “Kunst aus AFRIKA” of the Ethnological Museum Berlin-Dahlem. Now she writes her PhD about the intersections of class and race in regard to education-oriented middle class parents whose child transits from pre-school to elementary school in so-called problem boroughs in the centre of Berlin.

Philippa Ebéné

Geschäftsführung und künstlerische Leitung der Werkstatt der Kulturen.

Mona El Omari

Mona El Omari is a Social Worker, Social Pedagogue, Kanaktivist, Poetess, and HipHop-Student/Scholar. She works in a 24/7 shelter for underage mothers and fathers with their kids.  Additionally, she currently is a PhD student at the Faculty of Sociology (Free University Berlin), where she focuses her research on “Hip-Hop Culture and Spoken Word Poetry as Spaces of Identity Negotiation for Arab Muslim Women in Germany”.

Nadia Fadil

is Assistant Professor at the *Interculturalism, Migration and Minority Research Center* at the Anthropology department at KULeuven. Her work addresses questions of subjectivity, governmentality, secularism applied to the question of Islam in Belgium and Europe.

Denise Ferreira da Silva

Professor in Ethics at Queen Mary University. Denise’s areas of interest include political theory, feminist theory, globalization, law & human rights, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and cultural studies. Denise intends to develop the following research agenda: (a) the formulation of a notion of Global Justice, which acknowledges and addresses the effects of present and past conditions of political (economic, juridic, and symbolic) subjugation; (b) the tracing and unweaving of the various layers and threads of the global matrix which, is a concept that describes the present global conditions of existence, and © the tracking and expanding of liberatory political moves and statements that may guide the delineation of a project of Global Justice that does not merely re-inscribe the limiting modern ontoepistemological premises.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

is Professor of Geography in the Earth and Environmental Studies Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; and regularly offers lectures at Maumaus School of Visual Arts in Lisbon. She received the BA and MFA in Dramatic Literature and Criticism from Yale, and the PhD in Geography from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She has many publications, invited lectureships, honors, and awards. Her prize-winning book is Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, published in 2007. In a front-page review, the San Francisco Chronicle said “Now, if you want to understand why progressive California leads the Western world with its regressive system of punishment, Gilmore’s “Golden Gulag” is the first must-read book of the 21st century”.

Kanishka Goonewardena

was trained as an architect in Sri Lanka and now teaches urban studies and critical theory at the University of Toronto, where he has been Director of the Program in Planning and the Centre for South Asian Studies. His research focuses on urban politics and design, imperialism and nationalism, and critical theory and Marxism; and his writings have appeared in a variety of scholarly and popular publications such as Antipode, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Radical History Review, Theory and Event, Planning Theory, Progressive Planning, Himal and Dissenting Dialogues. He co-edited Space, Difference and Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre and is currently working on a monograph on nationalist ideology in Sri Lanka and a joint book project with Stefan Kipfer on new critical-theoretical approaches to the relationship between urbanization and colonization.

Ramón Grosfoguel

Ramon Grosfoguel is professor in the Ethnic Studies Department in the University of California at Berkeley and senior research associate of the Maison des Science de l'Homme in Paris. He has published extensively on questions of racism, islamophobia, Caribbean migration and political-economy of the world-system.

Kien Nghi Ha

Fellow of the Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies at the University of Bremen and independent curator holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies and a Diploma in Political Sciences. Previously, he has hold research positions at New York University, University of Heidelberg and University of Tübingen. His research interests focus on postcolonial criticism, racism, migration and Asian Diasporic Studies. His lastest monograph „Unrein und vermischt. Postkoloniale Grenzgänge durch die Kulturgeschichte der Hybridität und der kolonialen »Rassenbastarde« (transcript 2010) was awarded with the Augsburger Science Prize for Intercultural Studies 2011. He is also author of other widely acknowledged books including “Ethnizität und Migration Reloaded” (1999/2004) and “Hype um Hybridität” (transcript 2005). He is also editor of “Asiatische Deutsche. Vietnamesische Diaspora and Beyond” (Assoziation A, 2012) and “re/visionen. Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland” (Unrast, 2007).

Abraham Habtemariam

Is a founding member of the „Initiative in Gedenkan an Oury Jalloh e.V.“ and he organizes with the Uhuru movement

Charlie Haddad

Jin Haritaworn

is Assistant Professor of Gender, Race and Environment at York University in Toronto, and has actively advised the conceptual work of the conference. Their research interests include queer gentrification, environmental racism and environmental justice, and figurations of the environment in urban, bio-medical and social movement discourses on life, death, degeneracy and regeneration. They are the editor and co-editor of several special issues and clusters on the intersection of race, gender and sexuality, including European Journal of Women’s Studies (2012, 19(½)), Sexualities (2006, 9(5)),  International Feminist Journal of Politics (2013, 15(4)), as well as the forthcoming book collection Queer Necropolitics (ed. with Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco, Routledge). They have just finished writing a book called “The Biopolitics of Mixing: Thai Multiracialities and Haunted Ascendancies” (out in October 2012 with Ashgate) and are working on a second one on the topics of today’s talk that will appear in the Pluto series Decolonial Studies, Postcolonial Horizons.

Rachel Herzing

is a member of Critical Resistance Oakland, a US-based organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex.

Rima Hussein

Rima Hussein (M.A.) is academically interested in philosophy and race, psychoanalysis and social theory and wrote her thesis on internalized racism. She is a femme of color, an Algerian and a Palestinian in Germany.

Natasha Kelly

Natasha A. Kelly is a PhD student at the Department of Communication Studies of the University of Münster and research assistant and lecturer at the Centre for transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt University Berlin. She is a writer and journalist and has been active in the anti-racist movement for many years. In May 2012, she was elected to the State Advisory Council for Integration and Migration of the Berlin Senate as a representative of the European Union.

Corina Kwami

Corina Shika Kwami is currently a candidate for a Master of Science of Public Health: Gender & Diversity at the Charité Universitätsmedizin in Berlin, Germany. She received her Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, DC USA(2010). After working at the World Health Organization Department for Evidence, Equity, Trade & Research and at the International Labour Organization’s Department for Partnerships & Development Cooperation (PARDEV), she worked as an External Relations Officer primarily on public-private partnerships at the ILO (2011). She was the recipient of the ThinkSwiss Research Scholarship from Embassy of Switzerland (2010), the American Association of Geographer’s Urban Geography Specialty Group’s Undergraduate Paper Award (2010) and coauthor of ‘Africa: Harnessing bright minds in the African diaspora’ in University World News (2011). She has undertaken study tours in Morocco, Ghana, Switzerland, the Dominican Republic, Qatar and Rwanda. The project “Jazz, Swing & Funk Walking Tour” emerges from academic interests and her continued work as a performer of, you guessed it, “jazz, swing and funk” on stages in Geneva, Berlin and Kigali.

Noémi Michel

Noémi Michel is PhD Student in Political Science at the University of Geneva. Her PhD dissertation addresses issues of racialized symbolic politics in postcolonial Europe. She investigates two recent controversies: the controversy over the law on the “positive role of colonization” in France and the controversy over the political campaign‟s poster which stages white sheep kicking out a black sheep of their territory in Switzerland. She considers these two debates as emblematic examples of debates on the State‟s management of public words and images which potentially generate “injury” upon racialized groups and individuals. This dissertation - as well as her general research interests - draw upon critical approaches in political theory and  postcolonial, queer, critical race and whiteness studies. Since discussion on “race” and “postcoloniality” remain very marginal in Swiss social sciences, she co-founded with Manuela Honnegger a research group named “thinking postcolonial and racial difference” (POST IT) in order to generate collective reflections on these topics.

Karen Michelsen Castañón

is a Peruvian-Canadian artist whose work tackles questions of autobiography and cultural translation, migration and historiographies, particularly those concerned with the colonial subject.

Isaac Ontiveros

is a member of Critical Resistance, a US-based organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex.

Mariam Popal

PhD - Associate Research and Teaching Fellow – English Studies and Anglophone Literatures - University of Bayreuth.

Theoretical Approaches and Research Areas

Feminist Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Methodology, Cultural Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Muslim/’Middle Eastern’ Anglophone Literatures, Afghan (- Diaspora -) Literature and Film, Diaspora Studies, Racializing and ‘Religion’/Islam as Sign in (Post-)Colonial History, Modern Middle East History and (Post-) Colonialism, Postcolonial Ethics

(Selected) Publications

Head Scarf Hip Hop – Bodies Narrating (Other) Stories, in: Kien Nghi Ha,Nicola Lauré al-Samarai, Sheila Myrosekar (eds.), Re/visionen –Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People auf Color auf Rassismus,Kulturpolitik und auf Widerstand in Deutschland, Unrast Verlag 2007, S.87-109.

The Gaze – Beyond the Orient and Beyond Civilizing Missions, in: Abbas Poya/Maurus Reinkowski (eds.), Das Unbehagen in der Islamwissenschaft. Ein klassisches Fach im Scheinwerferlicht der Politik und der Medien,*transcript 2008, S. 283-300.

Isidora Randjelović

Dipl. Sozialpädagogin/Sozialarbeiterin promoviert im Bereich Erziehungswissenschaften zu den Arbeitsbedingungen migrantisierter Fachkräfte und derer Strategien im Umgang mit Kulturalisierungen und Vergeschlechtlichung  im ambulanten Bereich der Jugendhilfe.  Sie ist Stipendiatin der Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin. Seit 2009 ist sie in der IniRromnja aktiv, einem Berliner Frauennetzwerk, welches sich gegen Antiziganismus einsetzt und auf gegenseitiges Empowerment hinzielt.

Saideh Saadat-Lendle

Psychologist and founder of LesMigraS – Antidiskriminierungs- und Antigewaltbereich der Lesbenberatung Berlin e.V.

Ella Shohat

Ella Habiba Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies who has lectured and written extensively on issues having to do with Eurocentrism, Orientalism, Postcolonialism, transnationalism, and diasporic cultures. More specifically, since the 1980s she has developed critical approaches to the study of Arab-Jews/Sephardim/Mizrahim. Her work has been translated into diverse languages, including: Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, Dutch, and Italian. Shohat has also served on the editorial board of several journals, including: Social Text, Middle East Critique, Meridians, Interventions, and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. She is a recipient of fellowships, including: The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, 1999; the University of California “Regents Lecturer,” U.C. Davis, 1997; the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (1991-1992), where she also taught at The School of Criticism and Theory (2006). In 2010, she was awarded a Fulbright research/lectureship at the University of São Paulo, Brazil working on the cultural intersections between the Middle East and Latin America. Recently, together with Sinan Antoon, she was awarded the NYU Humanities Initiative fellowship for developing the course “Narrating Iraq: Between Nation and Diaspora.” She is Affiliated Faculty with the Comparative Literature Department; the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis; The Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies; Media, Culture & Communication and the Visual Culture Program (Steinhardt); and also Affiliated Faculty, NYU-Abu Dhabi.

Yasemin Shooman

Yasemin Shooman holds a Magister degree in Modern History and German Literature. She is a PhD candidate at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Technische Universität Berlin. Her research focus is on anti-Muslim Racism/Islamophobia, Minority Politics in Germany and Media Analysis. She has given lectures at universities, political foundations and NGOs and has published several articles and book chapters on these issues, the most recent one: „Vom äußeren Feind zum Anderen im Inneren. Antimuslimischer Rassismus im Kontext europäischer Migrationsgesellschaften“, in: Asiatische Deutsche. Vietnamesische Diaspora and Beyond, ed. by. Kien Nghi Ha, Berlin 2012, pp. 305-320.

Vanessa Eileen Thompson

M.A., is a decolonial activist and a research assistant and doctoral candidate in the department of sociology at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany. Recently she graduated with a M.A. in philosophy and in her M.A. thesis entitled, “Frantz Fanon on Alienation through Colonisation”, she has worked on Fanon’s notion of colonial alienation and on contemporary questions of decolonizing the Self against the background of his critical phenomenology of racism. Currently she is working on a PhD dissertation, which explores forms of radical Black activism, Black consciousness raising and the struggle against racism in France. Her research interests lie in the field of anti- and decolonial theory and Black studies.

Koray Yılmaz-Günay

Is consultant for Migration in the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation. Since the mid-90s he works politically and publicizes in the fields of racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism. Since spring 2012 he is a board member of the Migrationsrat Berlin-Brandenburg.