2022-23 Events

NIKOL ALEXANDER-FLOYD is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. A lawyer and political scientist, Dr. Alexander-Floyd has been actively engaged in a wide range of political and legal issues. A strong advocate for minorities, particularly women of color, she co-founded the Association for the Study of Black Women in Politics, an organization dedicated to supporting the development of Black women’s and gender studies and the professionalization of Black women political scientists. As a legal theorist and activist, she has produced scholarship and provided commentary on some of the cutting edge legal cases of our time; her involvement and leadership around the important Hopwood case in Texas led to guest appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and National Public Radio. Dr. Alexander-Floyd is the author of Re-Imagining Black Women: A Critique of Post-Feminist and Post-Racial Melodrama in Culture and Politics and Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics.

DAWNE MARIE MOUZON, PhD, Associate Professor of Sociology, engages in research that seeks to identify and explain risk and protective factors for the physical and mental health of populations of African descent. Specifically, she investigates the interplay between social relationships, psychosocial stressors, resilience, and health across the life course among Black Americans. Her early work focused on testing presumed protective factors to explain “the Black-White mental health paradox”, or the unexpected finding that Black Americans generally exhibit better mental health outcomes than Whites despite their lower socioeconomic standing and greater exposure to discrimination. Her current research program focuses on identifying adaptive coping resources and strategies African Americans use in the face of chronic stress and racial discrimination..

DONNA MURCH is associate professor of history at Rutgers University, where she is chapter president of the New Brunswick chapter of Rutgers AAUP AFT. Her newest book, Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives was published by Haymarket Books in March 2022. In October 2010, Murch published Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California with the University of North Carolina Press, which won the Phillis Wheatley prize in December 2011. Professor Murch is currently completing a new trade press book entitled Crack in Los Angeles: Policing the Crisis and the War on Drugs. She has written for the Sunday Washington Post, Guardian, New Republic, Nation, Boston Review, Jacobin, Black Scholar, Souls, the Journal of Urban History, Journal of American History, Perspectives and New Politics and appeared on BBC, CNN, Democracy Now and in Stanley Nelson’s documentary, Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI.

KEVON RHINEY (he/him/his) is an Associate Professor of Human-Environment Geography in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. He has held research positions at the University of Oxford and the University of the West Indies. His primary research examines the conditions that drive agrarian change, and the socio-material implications these changes pose for smallholder livelihoods. More recent research has started to explore the biopolitical dimensions of post-hurricane reconstruction efforts across the Caribbean. Dr. Rhiney has co-edited two books and his work has been published in a number of interdisciplinary journals including the Annual Reviews, Geoforum, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Small Axe and World Development. He is the Development section editor for Geography Compass and served as a contributing author for the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C.