Dr. Atiya Husain is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and a faculty affiliate in Anthropology/Sociology at Williams College. Her work has been published in scholarly journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, as well as popular outlets including Boston Review, Slate, and Adi Magazine. She is a founding co-editor of the University of Toronto Press series “Dimensions: Islam, Muslims, and Critical Thought,” a founding board member of Communication and Race, and has also served as Associate Editor of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. She has a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor.

In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism, where she traces the origins and logics of the FBI wanted poster and argues how this logic continues to structure wanted posters, as well as much contemporary social scientific thinking about race.

Dr. Celina de Sá is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally from the SF Bay Area, she received her PhD with distinction at the University of Pennsylvania in Africana Studies and Anthropology. Outside of her professional life, she is also a capoeirista and training to be a flamenco dancer.

In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph Diaspora Without Displacement: The Coloniality and Promise of Capoeira in Senegal, (published by Duke University Press July 2025) where she analyzes a capoeira network across West Africa, de Sá shows how urban West Africans use capoeira to explore the relationship between Blackness, diaspora, and African heritage.

Dr. Julia Elyachar is an author, anthropologist, and political economist. She was trained in anthropology, economics, history of political and economic thought, political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. At Princeton, she is an associate professor of anthropology, and associate professor at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She received her BA in Economics from Barnard College, Columbia University and her MA and PhD in Anthropology and Middle East Studies from Harvard University.

In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized. Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Dr. Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule.