Thomonique is an educational technologist, learning designer, and doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication. Informed by her work in edtech and industry consulting, she is interested in how sociotechnical systems not only shape Black life but are shaped by it, and how Black users presently and historically navigate, adapt, refuse, and reimagine these systems in ways that unsettle dominant narratives of innovation and progress. Her research explores Black American technoculture and technoskepticism with a particular focus on how AI and other digital technologies mediate Blackness, identity, and cultural memory.

Christiana Dillard is a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently studying how affect and ideology are circulated and operationalized on Christian mobile apps that aid religious practice. Christiana was a National Association of Black Journalists – Facebook Fact-Checking Program fellow from 2021 to 2022. She previously worked as a news writer for the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. She earned an M.A. in Media Studies and Production from Temple and a B.A. in English Writing from the University of Pittsburgh.

Chris Wiley is an information scientist, librarian, and writer whose work explores Black digital life, care, and meaning-making across sociotechnical systems. His research centers on Black queer and trans communities, examining how people navigate platforms, knowledge, and visibility as they create spaces of connection and joy. Chris is especially interested in relational research practices, digital storytelling, and everyday acts of care as sites of resistance. He brings a reflective, community-rooted approach to projects that imagine more humane and just digital futures.

Dr. Brenice Duroseau is a T32 postdoctoral scholar at Duke University and a sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and health equity nurse scientist. She is also a practicing nurse practitioner in infectious diseases and addiction medicine with over 17 years of healthcare experience. Her work centers on advancing culturally grounded, trauma-informed care and examining how social, structural, and political determinants shape health inequities across women's life course. Dr. Duroseau completed her PhD at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, where her NIMH-funded mixed-methods dissertation examined social, structural, and political determinants influencing SRH service utilization, acceptance, and access among cisgender Black women in Maryland.

Taylor L. Smith is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Smith holds a degree in African & African-American Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work explores Black girls and women’s unique contributions to Black textual and visual literacies with specific attention to aesthetic, memory, and archival construction. Additionally, she investigates how long-standing Black communal practices of memory-making and information diffusion adapt to the possibilities of digital media. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council, and the Center for Digital Culture and Society.

Dr. Sabah Firoz Uddin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies at Bowie State University, in Bowie, Maryland. She holds a PhD in Women’s/Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her scholarly interests range widely from global and postcolonial feminisms, gender in the Muslim world, South Asian diasporas, and Muslims and material culture. Recently, she was awarded the ACLS HBCU Faculty Fellowship (2025-2026).

Nioshi Shah is a Sociology PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She researches play and space and is interested in making experimental video games as a form of playful pedagogy. 

Johnita Cody is a PhD candidate in Sociology at The Ohio State University. Her research interests lie at the intersections of race/ethnicity, carcerality, culture, media, and mis/disinformation. She is particularly interested in dissecting the ways in which traditional and new media reflects and influences public opinion, collective behavior, and racial and ethnic relations. Her ongoing research seeks to serve as a deeper exploration into the conspiratorial beliefs of Black Americans, with aims to obtain a greater understanding of the pathways by which contemporary Black Americans encounter conspiracy theories, and the mechanisms that contribute to subscription to such beliefs amongst this demographic.

Katia Destine is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of Maryland. Her research explores how social inequalities and power structures shape our relationship to media, cultural resources, and creative expression. Her current work focuses on cultural workers and institutions and how they navigate boundaries of race, class, and gender. She is particularly interested in how underrepresented artists navigate the modern-day creator economy and how they use community and storytelling to challenge cultural erasure, exploitation, and representation. 

Jayvyn Dacas is an interdisciplinary thinker, multimodal artist, and critical scholar working at the intersection of Black studies, sound, and emerging technology. A first-generation Black American of Jamaican descent, their practice is shaped by the rhythms and productions of diasporic traditions rooted in care, memory, and improvisation. They recently published an Honors thesis, Rhythm Against Poethics, which examines Black music production, community, and digital media through critical theory, design, and sound studies. Their creative work engages immersive and extended media, critical making, and reflections on how automation and technology might be reoriented toward Black social life, intimacy, and world-building. 

James Perla is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a certificate in Digital Studies. Perla's research project investigates how contemporary novelists represent creative labor in the millennial era. Engaging with the representation of freelancers, bedroom musicians, entrepreneurial producers, and influencers, the dissertation probes the racial, gendered, and affective politics of representing work in the 21st-century Internet economy. 

Alex Thomas is a postdoctoral fellow within the Black Studies Department at the University of Rochester. Alex is a critical media studies scholar with a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Maryland, College Park. Their work focuses on monstrosity, ecocriticism, and nonhumanism within animation and graphic novels to study how dehumanized people, objects, and places can be centered within a culture dominated by humanist ideals.

Yasmine Skalli is a Research Associate at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. She received a bachelor’s degree in Social and Environmental Geography from the Ohio State University. As a researcher, she is interested in exploring how racialized populations resist systemic oppression through community building and networks of support. 

Marline D. Edmond is a Health Communication Strategist with more than 15 years of experience in government, health technology, and higher education. She is a doctoral candidate in the Communication, Culture, and Media Studies program at Howard University’s Cathy Hughes School of Communications, specializing in Health Communication. As a critical cultural health communication scholar, Marline examines the intersections of race, culture, public health, policy, digital humanities, and technology. Her research focuses on Black maternal health, social media, and mobile health (mHealth) applications. In 2023, Marline founded Plug Communications, LLC, a firm dedicated to advancing culturally competent health communication strategies that promote equitable health information in Plain Language U Get (PLUG).

Bryant Taylor (they/them) is currently a PhD candidate in the inaugural Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies (IRES) program at the University of Oregon. They’re research focuses on Black queer homemaking practices through personal archiving and video games. When they aren’t working, they’re playing tennis, gaming with close friends, or traveling around Europe. 

Eric Kadenge is a communication specialist with over 15 years of experience. He values the sharing of knowledge through mentorship, teaching, research, and content creation. Additionally, he enjoys socialising, traveling, photography, swimming, and cooking.

Viola Torkornoo is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication, Culture, and Media Studies at Howard University. Her work explores media, culture, and power through African popular music, digital platforms, and cultural diplomacy. Centering Afrobeats and diasporic media, she examines how African creativity circulates globally and how digital systems shape representation, visibility, and narratives of Black joy. Her research positions African cultural production as both a form of expression and a site of resistance, highlighting joy as a political, creative, and communicative force within global media systems.

Caitlin Gunn is a scholar of Black feminist theory, digital culture, and speculative thought. She directs The Pedagogy Lab housed at the Center for Feminist Futures at UC Santa Barbara, where she develops open educational resources, public humanities initiatives, and experimental projects that connect scholarship to teaching. Caitlin works across genres, including speculative fiction, games, and critical pedagogy, to imagine more just futures. Her scholarship appears in journals such as Hypatia and Feral Feminisms, along with edited collections in feminist theory and digital culture.

Margie Henry, Founder of ATL DataLab, brings nearly two decades of experience using data to shape business strategy. Her background spans analytics, software engineering, product management, and leadership. She has helped build data platforms, AI infrastructure, trust and safety programs, and data governance frameworks across organizations ranging from small nonprofits to industry leaders like Apple. She is also a practicing visual artist working primarily in clay, wood, and acrylic. With values grounded in community and shaped by her creative family, her work centers on building technology that honors our futures, scaffolds our dreams, and preserves the places we call home.

Lauren Austin Alcindor is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her academic interests include digital materiality, cross-platform storytelling, literatures of waste, as well as Black diasporic texts. Experimentation is a key theme in Lauren's research pursuits, which also include creative-critical practice.

Kellen Sharp is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research examines toxic technocultures, disinformation, and digital platforms, with particular attention to how race, gender, and health are shaped by algorithmic systems and online communities.