Rhea Rahman - "Racializing the Ummah" - Eman Abdelhadi, Darryl Li

Rhea Rahman is an associate professor of anthropology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Her research engages global racial formations in relation to histories and enactments of Islamic practice and Muslim identity. Her first book, Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown and White, (Minnesota, 2026), frames international Muslim volunteerism, humanitarianism and development within intersecting racial logics of white supremacy, Islamophobia, and anti-Blackness, while also locating alternative visions of doing good that are grounded in Islam as the foundation of a revolutionary praxis. She is working on a new project that explores Muslimness, Queerness, and abolition in the US.

Eman Abdelhadi is a Chicago-based scholar, organizer, and writer. An Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, she is author of the forthcoming Impossible Futures: Why Women Leave Muslim Communities (University of Chicago Press) and co-author of the sci-fi novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 (Common Notions, 2022).

Darryl Li is associate professor of anthropology and associate member of the law school at the University of Chicago. His first book, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press, 2020) was an ethnographic study of "jihadist foreign fighters" thinking about questions of universalism and solidarity. He is currently writing a book theorizing captivity through the lens of Guantanamo and other sites of enforced holding under the U.S.-led War on Terrorism in an attempt to connect questions of abolition and anti-imperialism. As a member of the bar in New York and Illinois, Li has been involved in litigation against War on Terror practices and has volunteered as an intake attorney for abolitionist bail funds in the Chicagoland area. Outside of his formal academic work, he also writes about colonialism, racialization, and law in Palestine.