Bio:
Tasneem Siddiqui is an assistant professor in the Department of History with a joint appointment in the Program in Africana Studies. Professor Siddiqui’s research explores the intersections of race, gender, categories of power, spirituality, geography, and how historically marginalized peoples and communities produce systems of knowledge that inform their futurity in freedom. This line of inquiry constitutes her current book-length manuscript titled, Freedom is a Place: Black Self-Determination in the Low Country and Sea Islands, which examines the post-Reconstruction freedom struggles waged by rural Black American laborers in South Carolina and Georgia’s low country and coastal islands for access to and ownership of land. This study argues that the struggle for land and a claim to place facilitates a form of communal life for racialized groups who faced systematic social marginalization in different phases of development in the New South.
Professor Siddiqui’s research methodologies and pedagogy seek to promote and preserve Africana histories, social, and cultural knowledge in the diaspora through digital humanities. She uses innovative ways to make critical scholarship/research available to local, national, and global communities. In this regard, Professor Siddiqui is the senior researcher, content contributor, and production director for Africa World Now Project (AWNP)—a multimedia nonprofit institution, radio broadcast, media collective, and digital humanities project—examines and provides textured analysis on issues related to African/a sociopolitical and cultural phenomena as it informs and is informed by social movements globally. Reviewed and accepted as a classroom resource with the National Humanities Center, this research oriented digital humanities project provides actionable information, intellectual production, expands and deepens the pedagogical practices in the classroom and beyond, broadening the theory and practice of social justice and human rights.
Much of Professor Siddiqui’s academic work, seeks to generate and promote new understandings of Africana sociopolitical (historical and contemporary) experiences to injustices. To this end, Professor Siddiqui serves as a member of Black Workers for Justice, and a board member of Communiversity. Communiversity is an educational institution of the Black working class, the Black liberation movement, and a working group of Black Workers for Justice, one of the longest Black workers organizations based in Eastern North Carolina. With links to movements in Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia, Communiversity maps and actively documents the histories of the Black Freedom Struggle, particularly in the U.S. South.