Vanessa Eileen Thompson
is Assistant Professor and Distinguished Professor in Black Studies and Social Justice in the Department of Gender Studies at Queen's University. Her scholarship and teaching explores the relation between state violence, racism and capitalism, and engages abolitionist struggles on local and global scales. She engages anti-colonial theories and methods, black social movement struggles in and beyond Europe, transnational relations as well as the many forms of alternatives developed and rehearsed by activist collectives and movements. Vanessa remains active in transatlantic abolitionist feminist collectives and supports transnational movement networking. She further collaborates with performers and artists on these topics and engages in media discussions.
SA Smythe
is Assistant Professor of Black Studies & the Archive and Founding Director of the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. They teach and write about transnational cultural memory work and black cultural production beyond genres and geographies; the racial capitalist trope of crisis in relation to citizenship and immigration policies between Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean; anticolonial thought and trans technē. Smythe's poetry, sound-performance, and other transmedia interventions mobilise the aesthetics of possibility to theorise black belonging and trans nonbinary embodiment. Smythe continues to organise with abolitionist, migrant support, and black arts collectives and networks across Turtle Island, Europe, and the Mediterranean.
Engy Mohsen
is an researcher currently pursuing an MSc in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford.
She holds a master’s degree in Transdisciplinary Studies from Zurich University of the Arts.
Her research focuses on independent art schools in the Arab world, exploring their reliance on and strategies for disengaging from foreign cultural funding structures, with a broader lens on cultural sovereignty and decolonial practices. As an artist, writer, and curator, her work manifests through self-published printed matter and collective, activist-driven constellations. She is one of five founding members of K-oh-llective, a platform for resource-sharing among art practitioners in Egypt and the Arab world. Engy is the Visual Designer for the Shared Horizons project.
Frederick Kannemeyer is a South African-trained architect who has expanded his practice into
art and web design. He explores the methods and outcomes of archiving, curation, mapping and collecting through a collaborative approach. With a successful history working with sociologists and
anthropologists, his work is centred around the liberatory politics of queerness, digital space,
decolonization, storytelling and abolition. He works across mediums often celebrating the glitches.
Fred is the Web Designer for the Shared Horizons project.