KEYNOTES & SPECIAL SPEAKERS

Sami Al-Haj holds a master’s degree in Business Administration and a Bachelor’s of Arts in Political Science from Poona University, India, where he studied from 1989 to 1992. He joined Al Jazeera Media Network in October 2000 as a journalist and is now the Director of its Center for Public Liberties and Human Rights. Under his stewardship, the Center has become a prominent advocate for press freedom, human rights monitoring, and the promotion of civil liberties worldwide. Al-Haj’s knowledge has been shaped by an ordeal that inflected debates about human rights and the rule of law at the global level—spending seven years detained without charge at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He was finally released in 2008. That same year, he received a Special Award from the Association for International Broadcasting and International News Safety Institute, and in 2009 the Fondazione Festival Pucciniano: named him International Reporter of the Year. His experience of incarceration and the events leading up to it have made him a compelling symbol of the perils facing journalists in the post 9/11 era.

Ariadna Godreau Aubert, J.D., is a human rights lawyer and adjunct professor. She graduated from the School of Law at the University of Puerto Rico and obtained a master’s degree in international human rights law from the University of Oxford. She is the founder and executive director of Ayuda Legal PR, a nonprofit organization that works to provide free legal support to marginalized communities. This organization advocates for fundamental rights from a perspective of legal empowerment, strategic litigation, and social impact advocacy. Godreau Aubert is the author of Las propias: apuntes para una pedagogía de las endeudadas (2018) and La subasta nuestra: apuntes desde la postdeuda y la posibilidad (2025).

Bertha A. Bermúdez-Tapia is Assistant Professor of Sociology at New Mexico State University.  She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her work focuses on multiple conceptualizations of violence, immigration, and policies regarding migration and asylum. It has dealt with international migration, race and ethnic relations, the social dimensions of immigration policies, U.S.-Mexico border relations, undocumented migration, and qualitative methods.  She specializes in ethnographic methods, but has also been trained in various quantitative analytic approaches. In addition to standard ethnographic techniques, her work has relied on participant photography, where research participants document their social environment, and also used drone and camera images as photographic evidence to create interacting mappings that record the sites, forms, and conditions of migrant camps. Her recent publications include “From Matamoros to Reynosa: Migrant Camps on the U.S.-Mexico Border,” which was published in the journal Contexts, and the chapter “Violencia y migración: campamentos de migrantes y estrategias de supervivencia en la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México” in the book Movilidades e inmovilidades en contextos migratorios. Ruralidades, control fronterizo y dinámicas sociales

Dr. Diana Murtaugh Coleman, a former Luce Fellow in Indonesia, is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University. Her research, focused on contemporary Islam, U.S. militarism, and carceral issues includes numerous talks, presentations, and publications. She is the author of a chapter in Guantánamo: The Humanities Respond; the article “El Sur También Existe: Imagining futures” in Cultural Dynamics, and articles in two special issues of Sargasso: the 2017-18 Guantánamo: What’s Next? Issue and the 2020-21 Camps, (In)Justice & Solidarity issue. She has conducted research, presented and participated in dozens of conferences, led panels and workshops, and guest lectured nationally and internationally, in the U.S., France, Morocco, Germany, South Africa, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Argentina, Uruguay, Bangladesh, Austria, India (virtually), and the UK. She was a Humanities Scholar and presenter for the 2023 TOM KIEFER: El Sueño Americano / The American Dream exhibit at the Coconino Center for the Arts and recently completed training with the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program at Temple University. As NAU’s 2024/25 College of Arts and Letters teacher of the year and NAU’s Interns to Scholars program 2024/25 Mentor of the Year, Dr. Coleman is deeply committed to empowering her students and to reaching broader publics beyond walls and borders.

Abdellatif Nasser was born and raised in Casablanca City, Morocco. After graduating from high school in mathematical science, he studied at the University of Science. For nearly twenty years, between 2002 and 2021, he was detained at the U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was never charged with a crime or tried, but like many others, he was repeatedly interrogated, tortured, and force-fed. He turned to hunger strikes because they were the only means by which he could resist soldiers’ harassment and arbitrary detention. He emerged as a block leader and for years pushed for educational opportunities for his fellow detainees. This led to his nickname, “the Minister of Education.” His story was widely covered in the New York Times, the Guardian, and in the 6-part NPR series “The Other Latif.” As noted in some of these reports, during his incarceration he created a handwritten bilingual (Arabic-English) dictionary that consisted of about 2,000 entries. In the two and a half years since his release, he has studied independently and completed different online courses in a variety of subjects.

Mohamedou Ould Salahi Houbeini is a writer, advocate, and former prisoner from Mauritania. He was detained at the U.S. government’s Guantánamo Bay prison without charge for approximately fourteen years. Houbeini wrote a memoir during his incarceration, which the U.S. government declassified in 2012 with numerous redactions. An international bestseller and the first memoir to be published while the author was still detained in the naval base, it was released as Guantánamo Diary in January 2015. In 2017, a “restored edition” was published with thousands of redactions removed and new life added. The memoir was used as the basis for “The Mauritanian,” a 2021 film starring Tahar Rahim, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Jodie Foster. Slahi wrote four other books in detention, one of which he describes as being “about finding happiness in a hopeless place.” In 2021, his novel The Actual True Story of Ahmed & Zarga was published by Ohio University Press in its Modern African Writers series. At the time of this writing, he is writer-in-residence at Noord Nederlands Toneel, a Dutch theatre company.

Rinaldo Walcott is Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo. He holds the Carl V. Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies. A writer and critic, his research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality with interests in nations, nationalisms, multiculturalism, as well as the histories of slavery, emancipation, incarceration and ongoing struggles for freedom. An interdisciplinary scholar, Walcott has edited or co-edited multiple works, and he is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997 with a second revised edition in 2003). He is also the author of Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies (Insomniac Press, 2016) and co-author of Black Life: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom (Arbeiter Ring, 2019). In 2021, Walcott published The Long Emancipation: Moving Towards Freedom (Duke University Press) and On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition (Biblioasis), which was nominated for the Heritage Toronto Book Award, longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards, named a Globe and Mail Book of the Year, and listed in CBC Books Best Canadian Nonfiction of 2021.