Tianna Paschel is assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of California – Berkeley. Previously, she served as the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her research centers on understanding the relationship between racial inequality, politics, and globalization in the Americas. She is the author of the award-winning book, Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil, which draws on ethnographic and archival methods to explore the shift in the 1990s from ideas of unmarked universal citizenship to multicultural citizenship regimes and the recognition of specific rights for black populations by Latin American states.
Her work can also be found in the American Journal of Sociology, the Du Bois Review, SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. Dr. Paschel is a Ford Fellow, a member of the American Political Science Association Task Force on Race and Class Inequality and has worked for over a decade in solidarity with Afro-Colombian struggles through the Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network (ACSN), Group of Academics and Intellectuals in Defense of the Colombian Pacific (GAIDEPAC) and the Network of Anti-Racist Research and Action (RAIAR).
Why I Am Involved in SSJ
“Intellectual work is always political work. The question has always been: What kind of politics does our work represent and to what ends? SSJ is an opportunity for me to continue the kind of work that bridges the academy and activism that has always been so meaningful to my trajectory as a scholar-activist. As someone who focuses on resistance to anti-black racism in the Americas, I am particularly committed to creating spaces to reflect on, conspire against, and resist oppression that take seriously the global and transnational circuits of power and oppression.”