Manissa McCleave Maharawal

Manissa McCleave Maharawal is a doctoral student in the Anthropology Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a co-chair of Women of Color Network at CUNY and an editor of the “Findings” column in Anthropology Now. Her PhD research focuses on struggles over urban space, gentrification and contemporary youth social movements in the United States. She is broadly interested in historical and contemporary struggles for social justice and understanding dynamics of race, class, and gender in formation of political subjectivities. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, The Guardian, N+1, AlterNet, The Indypendent, Racialicious, Counterpunch,Waging Nonviolence, among other online and print periodicals, as well as in a number of edited books and anthologies.

Manissa is also an oral historian currently interviewing for the Crossing Borders Bridging Generations project that examines the history and experiences of mixed-heritage people and families, cultural hybridity, race, ethnicity, and identity. She is currently also working with theAnti-Eviction Mapping Project in San Francisco to add stories of evictions and displacement to their maps.

She has been an Adjunct Professor in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Baruch College, CUNY teaching courses on Power and Conflict, Anthropology of South Asia, and Critical Introduction to Anthropology as well as an Adjunct Professor in the Urban Studies department at Queens College, CUNY where she assisted teaching Urban Studies 101 and taught Race and Ethnicity.