Angela Austin talks with Jessica Johnson and Yomaira Figueroa about transformative justice, social justice and Black Lives Matter.
Jessica Marie Johnson is an Assistant Professor of History at Michigan State University. Johnson holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in History from the University of Maryland, College Park and a B.A. in African and African American Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was also a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Her research interests include women, gender, and sexuality in the African diaspora; histories of slavery and the slave trade; and digital history and new media and has appeared in Slavery and Abolition and Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism.
As a digital humanist, Johnson is interested in ways digital and social media disseminate and create historical narratives, in particular, comparative histories of slavery and people of African descent, and the power of radical media to create social change. In 2008, she founded African Diaspora, Ph.D., a blog highlighting scholars and scholarship in the field of Atlantic African diaspora history. Johnson continues to make media as a member of two collaborative projects: the LatiNegrxs Project, a Tumblr and community interrogating Afrxlatinidad from the lens of transformative justice; and the Queering Slavery Working Group, which she co-organizes with Vanessa Holden (Michigan State).
Yomaira Figueroa is an assistant professor of English and African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Dr. Figueroa earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in the department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in English, Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies from Rutgers University.
A recent transplant to the midwest, she is a native of Hoboken, NJ, by way of Puerto Rico. She works on 20th century U.S. Latinx Caribbean, Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic literature and culture. She offers courses in the Department of English, the African American and African Studies Program, and the Chicano/Latino Studies Program.
