Indigenous Perspectives on Decolonization

Ashley Minner is a community-based visual artist from Baltimore and an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She received her MFA (’11) and MA (’07) in Community Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art, and her PhD (’20) in American Studies from University of Maryland College Park. Ashley recently worked as a professor of the practice and folklorist in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she also served as director of the minor in Public Humanities. She currently works as a curator for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. 

Dana Olwan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. Her work is located at the nexus of feminist theorizations of gender violence, transnational solidarities, and critical feminist pedagogies. She is the recipient of a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader Award from the Institute of Citizens and Scholars, a Future Minority Studies postdoctoral fellowship, and a Palestinian American Research Council grant. Her work has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Formations, the Journal of Settler Colonial Studies, American Quarterly, and Feral Feminisms. She is co-editor with Margaret A. Pappano of Muslim Mothering: Local and Global Histories, Theories, and Practices (Demeter Press, 2016). Her first book Gender Violence and The Transnational Politics of the Honor Crime was published by Ohio State University Press in 2021. She is currently working on a new project that is centered on marriage and divorce laws and citizenship practices in the Arab world, with a specific focus on Jordan and women’s access to personal status rights. She teaches courses on feminist theory, comparative settler colonialisms, and gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa. She is co-editor (with Chandra Talpade Mohanty) of Comparative Feminist Studies from Palgrave Mcmillan.