Ruba Akkad is a Palestinian-Syrian scholar, educator, and community organizer completing her Ph.D. in English with graduate certificates in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and Women and Gender Studies at TCU. She is primarily interested in Palestinian resistance studies and Third World Feminisms as well as contemporary multiethnic American literature focusing on race, gender, diaspora, anticolonialism, and resistance movements. Her current work investigates joy as a vital component and site of anticolonial resistance along lines of Black and Palestinian joint struggle. You can read her published work in Across the Disciplines: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language, Learning, and Academic Writing, and Mondoweiss.

Elissa is a Doctoral Candidate in Curriculum Studies at TCU. After teaching public elementary school for 7 years, she left the classroom in 2016 to start an education-related 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and determined to further her own education at TCU. In her current work, she engages with qualitative research methodologies, critical theories, and liberatory pedagogies to foster practices of self-care and collective conscious action through radical love and inter-religious Femme spirituality. She has attained certifications in both Women and Gender Studies (WGST) and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) and is passionate about cultivating spaces for diverse communities to come together, challenge their assumptions, transcend their limitations, and co-create a better world for us all.

José Luis Cano Jr. works to understand educational mechanisms, especially those at the US-México border. A doctoral degree facilitates this task, so he’s a PhD candidate in rhetoric and composition at TCU. He investigates race, language, migration, law, and carcerality, so he identifies the border checkpoint as a site that educates folks on these collective forces. In addition, he teaches Latinx rhetorics and engages brown digital humanities. José Luis approaches public scholarship as a method to speak (some sense) to these educational mechanisms situated inside and outside of formal school settings. Prior to doctoral work, José Luis worked as a qualitative researcher, adjunct instructor, and high school teacher. He’s an incoming managing editor for constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space and an incoming assistant editor for College English. His writing appears in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric Technology, and Pedagogy and Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies.

Saffyre Falkenberg is a Ph.D. candidate in English with graduate certificates in Women and Gender Studies and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University. She is the 2022-2023 Assistant Director of Composition at TCU and was the 2021-2022 Lorraine Sherley Research Associate. Broadly, she is interested in the ways in which girls and women are represented in and engaged with popular culture. More specifically, children's and young adult literature, disability studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Her dissertation examines representations of disabled and chronically ill youth in young adult genre fiction. Her most recent book chapter examines race and ethnicity in Greek mythological adaptations for young adults, and her forthcoming article in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly focuses on liberal multiculturalism in post-Trump picture books. Outside of academia, she loves K-Pop, video games, and needlecrafts.

Gabriel Huddleston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies, Director of the Center for Public Education and Community Engagement and Chair of the Counseling, Social, and Inquiry Department at Texas Christian University. He is also Core Faculty with both the Women and Gender Studies and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies departments. He teaches classes in curriculum studies and qualitative inquiry. His work in curriculum studies utilizes a Cultural Studies theoretical framework within qualitative research to examine intersections between schools and society broadly and, more specifically, relationship between neoliberal education reform and teachers. His other research interests include popular culture, spatial theory, new materialism, and postcolonial studies. He has publications in the several journals, including Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education; The Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy; The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies; Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices; and The Currere Exchange Journal.

He served as Managing Editor of the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCT) from 2013-2018. During this time, he was also the Program Chair and co-organizer for JCT’s annual conference, The Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice. Gabriel has also served as the Chair for the Critical Issues in Curriculum Studies and Cultural Studies SIG of AERA.

Angela D. Mack is a PhD candidate in rhetoric and composition, having previously served as Assistant Director of Composition and Assistant Director of The Center for Digital Expression (The CDEx) at TCU. With a background in performance poetry, creative writing, and storytelling, her scholarship and teaching span across African American/Black rhetorics, global majority rhetorics, racialized geographies/cartographies, oral histories, linguistic justice, inclusive pedagogies, and popular culture. Her current project uses Black Storytelling to reclaim and center the Black experience in her home community, to amplify the life and legacy work in remembrance of Atatiana Jefferson from that community, and to situate Black world-making as a praxis of care for those impacted by the racial trauma of anti-Black violence. Angela has worked in community college, dual credit, and university settings with her experience ranging from writing center tutoring and administration, continuing education and adult literacy instruction, and teaching courses in poetry, creative writing, composition and rhetoric, and in pop culture. Her writing can be found in Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy; Women, Gender, and Families of Color; and in the forthcoming edited collection, Interminable Rhetorics: Women and Gendered Labor in a Post-2020 Economy.

Dr. Brandon J. Manning is an Associate Professor of Black Literature and Culture in the Department of English and an affiliate faculty member in the Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Department and Women & Gender Studies Department at Texas Christian University. He is outgoing interim director for the African American and Africana Studies program and member of the AddRan Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee. He also participated in the 2021 AddRan Dean’s Leadership Academy. His book, Played Out: The Race Man in 21st Century Satire from Rutgers University Press, is an examination of black masculine performance and vulnerability through the lens of contemporary satire. Alongside his monograph, he has published numerous essays in journals and edited collections and co-edited a special issue of The Black Scholar on “Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability.”

Stacie McCormick, is a Mississippi-raised Black feminist scholar and writer. She is an Associate Professor of English, Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Texas Christian University (TCU). Her work takes up a number of subjects such as: representations of the body, land, sexuality, and the ongoing resonance of slavery in contemporary Black writing and performance. She is the author of Staging Black Fugitivity and co-Editor of the Special Issue of College Literature, Toni Morrison and Adaptation. Currently, she is developing a manuscript on Black critical engagement with gynecological and obstetric medicine. She is pursuing this work as a 2021-2022 Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellow in residence with The Afiya Center, a Reproductive Justice organization in Dallas, TX.

Meagan Solomon is a queer Mexican-Jewish scholar and educator completing her PhD in English with graduate certificates in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and Women and Gender Studies at TCU. She researches and teaches across the fields of feminist and queer studies, race and ethnic studies, and U.S. literary and cultural studies with particular interests in Chicana feminist literature, queer intimacies and a/sexualities, and anti-colonial and abolitionist pedagogies. Her dissertation, “Queer/ing Intimacies: Radical Love and Friendship in Chicana Feminist Literature,” theorizes queer love and friendship as sites of social disruption and reimagining in Chicana feminist fiction. You can read her published and forthcoming work in Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, Critical Biographies of Chicana Authors, The Latino Literature Encyclopedia for Students, and The Handbook of Texas Women.

Jason A. Smith was recently admitted to the Ph.D. program at Texas Christian University. He is a Departmental Assistant for the Public Humanities Lab curated by Dr. Stacie McCormick and the Public Scholarship in Action Research Collective. He graduated from Valdosta State University with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 2015 and a Master of Arts in English in 2018. His interests include multi-ethnic American literature, contemporary American literature, post-colonialism, Marxism, and ecocriticism. His master’s thesis focused on multi-ethnic American literature post-1945. Specifically, his thesis focused on the concept of American identity by using ideas such as panopticism, othering, and superstructures. After graduating in 2018, Jason worked for Valdosta State University for two years, teaching composition, world literature, and journalism. Additionally, Jason was an award-winning journalist for The Valdosta Daily Times.