Our Conference Co-Chairs

Ra Malika Imhotep, ph.d (Ra/They/Them/doll) is an ancestor-accountable living thinker, cultural worker, and educator whose work aspires to further the traditions of revolutionary Black feminisms and black diasporic theorizing. Born and bred in Atlanta, GA, they are currently in service to their community as an Assistant Professor of Global African Diaspora Studies at Spelman College. Their intellectual and creative work looks after the ways Black feminine figures across the African diaspora, the circum-Atlantic world, and the Dirty South subvert preconceived notions about black femininity, gender, sexuality, and labor through craft & aesthetic practices. They hold a PhD in African Diaspora Studies and New Media Studies from the University of California-Berkeley. 

They are the author of the poetry collection gossypiin (Red Hen Press, 2022), co-convenor of The Church of Black feminist Thought and a member of The Black Aesthetic curatorial collective. Their work has been featured in The Guggenheim Museum, The Academy of American Poets, Women & Performance, The Drama Review, Palimpsest, and several anthologies. They are currently working on their first academic monograph titled, The Tar Baby Principle : Embracing the Black trickster-feminine.

I was born & bred in West Atlanta, between Zone 1 and Zone 3 – the predominantly Black neighborhoods known as the West End, Vine City, and English Avenue. 

In Ntozake Shange’s 1975 novel Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo; the youngest dawta, Indigo is continuously described as a child with “too much south in her.” It is the south in her that keeps her conversing with the “unreal,” the south in her that fills her bedroom with living dolls, the south in her that maintains a vivid connection to the slaves that were ourselves.  The south in me is citified by virtue of being born in Atlanta proper, but I come from two ancestral lines that run through rural Georgia red clay. My doll-making-seamstress-social aid organizer mother made the choice to return to her ancestral land. My poet-actor-puppeteer-mathematician father fled his own Middle Georgia briar patch for the unencumbered life of an artist in the Black Mecca.  

It is through my parents and the community of Afrocentric-black-cultural-nationalist-artist-artisans-cultural-workers that they belong to that I came to know Atlanta as home to every flavor of Black consciousness imaginable. 

The post-freaknik Atlanta that I came of age in was ripe with dirty possibilities: it stank, it shined, it p*ssy-popped . After more than a decade spent stretching the bounds of my intellectual imagination from New England to Northern California, I returned home to help guide my father across the Crystal River. During his transition I learned Spelman was hiring someone to teach “Global African Diaspora Studies” and I applied thinking it would make caregiving easier, but as my father completed his transition and I settled deeper into a home town now colored by loss, I the real work was to relearn Atlanta as a space for healing..

I currently live less than 5 minutes from where Toni Cade Bambara hosted her Pamoja writing salons, around the corner from a health center established by a coalition of protoblack feminist social aid workers in 1908. Despite what the signs say, apple maps will tell you the street I live on is named after Dorothy Bolden – founder of the National Domestic Workers Union of America. All this less than 10 minutes from the Atlanta University Center in one direction and  Magic City in another. 

Besieged by big tech, little hollywood, and post-racial greed, Atlanta itself is what i would call a Tar Baby – a sticky figuration that would be impossible to conceptualize without Black femininity, a honey trap, a study of complexity, a haven for economic disparities, a sacred black space, a trickster.

Beloved community,

My name is Rosita Scerbo (she/her/ella), a proud daughter of immigrants, multicultural and multilingual woman, and a first-generation graduate whose family roots trace to the Global South. I organize in my local community in support of immigrant rights, reproductive justice, and land and water justice. These commitments shape the political and ethical grounding of my work and inform how I approach knowledge, collaboration, and care.

At Georgia State University, I serve as Chair of LACCHI, the Latina/o/x, Chicana/o/x, Caribbean, Hispanic and Indigenous Affinity Group. LACCHI is a faculty, staff, and student collective dedicated to building community, mentorship, and support networks across Latinx, Caribbean, and Indigenous diasporic communities while strengthening connections between the university and the broader Atlanta community.

I am also a co-founding member of the Black Land Working Group (BLWG), an interdisciplinary collective whose central mission is to document, validate, empower, uplift, support, amplify, and strengthen the voices, lives, and struggles of Black people whose efforts to protect their land, livelihoods, and communities have too often been overlooked, marginalized, or erased. Our collective brings together scholars, students, and community members from the fields of History, Sociology, Geography, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Languages and Cultures Studies, Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy Studies, and Africana Studies. Within the BLWG, my work focuses on the Black Aquatics stream, which explores the gendered, spiritual, ecological, and historical relationships between Black communities and water.

I am also a Candomblé practitioner, initiated within an Afro-diasporic spiritual tradition in which land, water, breath, rhythm, and spiritual forces are understood as living, agentic presences rather than symbolic resources. This spiritual grounding profoundly shapes my approach to knowledge, ethics, and embodiment. Ritual practice in Candomblé is inseparable from ecological awareness, centering reciprocal relationships with land and water, attentiveness to environmental balance, and the cultivation of care, responsibility, and survival through embodied practice.

Professionally, I am an Associate Professor of Visual and Digital Cultures in the Institute for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Georgia State University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Africana Studies. My research and teaching focus on Afro-Latinx visual and digital culture, with particular attention to Black visualities of the Global South and its diasporas through feminist, decolonial, Black, and visual culture studies. I am the author of three books centering Black and Brown women from Latin America and the Caribbean: Latinas on the Margins: QueerARTivism and TRANSdisciplinarity. Towards a Politicization of the Visual Autobiography of Invisible Women (2021); The Afro-descendant Woman in Latin American Diasporic Visual Art (2024); and Gendered Aesthetics of Blackness: Afro-Cuban Women’s Visual Art and Activism (2025). Across my work, I examine how visual, performative, and digital practices engage questions of embodiment, ecology, memory, spirituality, and environmental violence within histories of colonialism and extraction. Water and eco-art are central to my analytical framework, serving as both material and epistemological sites through which artists articulate resistance, care, and alternative modes of relation.

It is an honor and a privilege to serve as one of the local co-chairs for the 46th National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference here in Atlanta, on the ancestral lands of the Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee peoples. I look forward to welcoming you to our city and to gathering in community, care, and collective imagination.

Atlanta has felt like home to me since the day I arrived. There is something about the city’s spirit, its histories of struggle and creativity, and the ways communities continually remake space for one another that resonates deeply with my own commitments as a feminist scholar and community organizer. For me, Atlanta feels like a place where feminist thought and feminist practice are constantly in dialogue with one another. It is a city where scholarship, activism, art, spirituality, and community life are deeply intertwined.

Part of why Atlanta feels like the right place for our gathering is the land itself and the histories it carries. The city sits on the ancestral lands of the Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee peoples, whose communities lived throughout this region long before the founding of the modern city. Indigenous villages and trade routes shaped the landscape that would later become Atlanta, including the Muscogee settlement of Standing Peachtree along the Chattahoochee River. Like much of the Southeast, this land was violently transformed through the forced removal of Indigenous nations in the nineteenth century. For me, acknowledging these histories is essential. Feminist scholarship asks us to think critically about power, memory, and accountability, and that includes recognizing the Indigenous histories and ongoing struggles connected to the land on which we gather.

Atlanta is also a city defined by survival and rebirth. Much of the city was burned during the Civil War in 1864, leaving large portions of it in ruins. Yet Atlanta rebuilt itself and adopted the phoenix rising from the ashes as its enduring symbol, along with the motto Resurgens, meaning “to rise again.” I often think about how fitting that symbol is for feminist work. Feminist movements have always been about rebuilding worlds after violence, imagining new futures out of rupture, and insisting on life in the face of erasure. 

Atlanta also reflects the histories of organizing and movement building that have shaped feminist scholarship itself. The city was a central site of the Civil Rights Movement and remains a powerful center of Black political organizing, intellectual life, and cultural production. These histories continue to influence feminist thought, especially Black feminist traditions that have emerged from the South and reshaped how we understand power, justice, and community.

The city has also long been a hub for feminist and queer organizing. In 1972, activists founded the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance, one of the longest-running lesbian feminist organizations in the United States. The group created organizing spaces, archives, and cultural networks that sustained lesbian feminist activism across the South for decades. Around the same period, Atlanta became a major center of LGBTQ organizing, with Pride marches beginning in the early 1970s and continuing today as one of the largest Pride celebrations in the country. The city is also home to Atlanta Black Pride, the largest celebration of Black LGBTQ community in the world. These histories of organizing reflect the kinds of intersectional, community-rooted feminist praxis that have long shaped the field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

Another reason Atlanta feels so meaningful to me is its cultural and diasporic richness. The city is home to communities from across the African diaspora, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and the broader Global South. Walking through Atlanta means hearing multiple languages, encountering diverse cultural and spiritual traditions, and experiencing festivals, artistic gatherings, and community spaces that reflect the dynamic multicultural life of the city. As someone whose work is grounded in Afro-diasporic culture and transnational feminist perspectives, this layered cultural landscape resonates deeply with my own intellectual and political commitments.

Atlanta feels like a powerful place for us to gather under the theme Wild Feminisms. To me, this theme evokes feminist practices that refuse containment, that grow from communities, from struggle, from creativity, and from the insistence on imagining otherwise. Atlanta embodies that spirit. It is a city shaped by movement building, collective care, diasporic cultures, and generations of organizing that have challenged systems of power while nurturing new forms of life and possibility. Gathering here feels especially fitting because Atlanta reflects the living, evolving, and insurgent energies that continue to shape feminist scholarship, feminist movements, and the futures we are collectively striving to build.