The Grammar of Reparation: A Creative and Research Symposium

Nicola Frith is Professor of Transatlantic Slavery and Reparatory Justice at the University of Liverpool, whose research focuses on the cultural, spiritual and environmental legacies of the transoceanic trafficking and enslavement of African peoples, and the need for reparatory justice. She is co-founder of the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR) and leads the ERC Consolidator Grant project Re-PAIR: Reparations and Pan-African Indigenous Repair (2026–2031). 

Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation citizen) is Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke University Press, 2025) and Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019), and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) and the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” He has published work in Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Latin American Research Review, and Art Journal, and in popular outlets including Hyperallergic, TruthOut, and Indian Country Today. With S.J. Norman (Wiradjuri), he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds, and in 2024-2025 he was a Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). 

Uhuru Phalafala is…here, not yet, elsewhere, over there, yonder, across, unfinished, in the clearing, besides, out there, below, unseen, process, unknown, ongoing... 

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography in the School of Society & Environment at Queen Mary University of London. Her research examines how inhuman and nonorganic materialities shape understandings of environmental change, race and subjectivity. She is the author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (Duke University Press, 2024), and co-author of Planetary Portals, with Casper Laing Ebbensgaard and Kerry Holden (Goldsmiths University Press, 2026). Her work theorizes the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically and how geophysical forces shape racialized experiences of environments.

Maria Raquel Passos Lima is a Brazilian anthropologist, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Social Sciences of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), where she founded and co-coordinates the research collective ResiduaLab: Laboratory of Social Studies of Waste. She is currently an International Research Fellow of the Urban Studies Foundation and a CNPq Postdoctoral Fellow, based as Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam.