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A Book Series Dedicated to Coalitional Politics, Interdisciplinarity, Community Building, Participatory Research, and Disruptive Thought

West Virginia University Press is pleased to announce Borderless, a new book series edited by Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, John C. Harris, and David Monk.

Oriented toward social justice and social transformation, the Borderless series will publish monographs and collections that cross disciplinary boundaries and blend social science and humanities methodologies. Books in the series will serve educators, students, activists, and policymakers and propose solutions to racial, gender, sexual, and ethnic oppression through coalitional politics. By offering a better understanding of the precarious situations of vulnerable populations and by making connections between geographically separated communities and struggles for liberation, these counternarratives and new interpretations of colonization, genocidal violence, and marginalization will provide innovative ways to think about action-oriented social justice research that is community centered and community driven. The editors and editorial board seek book-length manuscripts focused on finding interdisciplinary solutions to global injustice, connecting communities of resistance, and forming coalition and solidarity. Borderless is committed to curating a series of innovative, experimental, interdisciplinary titles that center decoloniality and transborder solidarity, that bring to the forefront marginalized voices and knowledges, and that recognize borders as liminal spaces where transformation is possible. 

In both theory and practice, Borderless:  

  1. critiques liberal and neoliberal approaches to development throughout the world and provides a venue for scholars critical of traditional approaches to development to publish and disseminate their ideas;
  2. focuses on developing communities wherever they are found and privileges local knowledges, communities, indigenous epistemologies, etc.;
  3. calls for coalitional politics and illustrates what coalition looks like on the ground;
  4. publishes manuscripts that have an applied focus, with a ground-up approach to inquiry, and that demonstrate how interdisciplinarity works in actual practice within actual situations.

Series Editors:

Maria del Guadalupe (Lupe) Davidson is associate dean for social justice, faculty development, and innovation and Woodburn Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at West Virginia University (USA). She is the author of Black Women, Agency, and the New Black Feminism. Davidson has coedited a number of collections including College Curriculum at the Crossroads: Women of Color Reflect and Resist and Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy. She is currently writing a book on deviance, the body, and art, and editing the collection The Black Feminist World.

John C. Harris is President’s Associate Professor of Regional and City Planning and codirector of the Center for Peace and Development at the University of Oklahoma (USA). Dr. Harris’s work reflects a commitment to partnering with communities to research and frame their own contexts through their own experiences and to bring their priorities to the policy-making table. Trained as an urban planner, with a master’s and doctorate from Florida State University, Dr. Harris seeks to work across disciplines in ways that bring grassroots organizations and academics together to cocreate pathways to transformative change. Prior to joining academia, Dr. Harris worked in several urban planning capacities and for a nongovernmental organization working with communities to rebuild South Sudan after a protracted civil war. Currently, Dr. Harris primarily works in partnership with grassroots women’s organizations in northern Uganda through the Center for Peace and Development.

David Monk is a lecturer in education and works at the Institute for Peace and Strategic Studies at Gulu University (Uganda). Dr. Monk is cochair of the Gulu Centre for Community-Based Participatory Research and Lifelong Learning. He is a community activist interested in empowering, transformative, and critical ecopedagogy to address systemic social and ecological injustices. Dr. Monk is committed to participating in a world that places love for people and the planet before profit and greed.

Advisory Board:

T. Elon Dancy 
Director, Center for Urban Education 
Helen Faison Chair in Urban Education
University of Pittsburgh

Petra Doan
Professor and Ph.D. Program Director, Department of Regional and Urban Planning
Florida State University  

Gregory Dunaway
Dean, Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Professor of Sociology
West Virginia University

Laura L. Harjo
Associate Professor of Planning and Community Development
University of New Mexico's School of Architecture and Planning 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries
Associate Professor, Department of History
The Ohio State University

Amy Lind
Director and Faculty Chair for the Taft Research Center 
Mary Ellen Heintz Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 
Cincinnati University

Cris Mayo 
Director of the LGBTQ+ Center
Professor of Women's and Gender Studies
West Virginia University

Mwalimu Musheshe
Vice Chancellor 
African Rural University

George Openjuru
Vice Chancellor 
Gulu University

Mariana Ortega
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Pennsylvania State University 

Nana Osei-Kofi, PhD (she/her)
Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies 
Director of the Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program
Oregon State University 

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry 
Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies
University of Pennsylvania

Gwendolyn Pough
Dean’s Professor of the Humanities
Chair, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
Syracuse University  

Antonia Randolph
Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 

Sharon Stein
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education
University of British Columbia

Kathryn Bond Stockton 
Distinguished Professor of English
Dean, School for Cultural and Social Transformation
University of Utah

Paul C. Taylor
W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies

Acting Chair, Department of Philosophy

Vanderbilt University

Co-convenor, The Black Philosophers Consortium

Kyle Whyte
George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability
University of Michigan

Izawati Binti Wook
Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Syariah and Law
Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia

For more information:

Authors interested in submitting proposals for consideration should contact series editor Lupe Davidson (lupe.davidson@mail.wvu.edu) or Than Saffel (WVUPress@mail.wvu.edu) at West Virginia University Press.

To submit a proposal, please follow the Borderless Series Proposal Submission Guidelines.

black vertical stripe on the left with white text; drawn picture of a coronavirus in blue, green, yellow, and white


Essential Voices
Edited by Amy M. Alvarez,
Pamela Gemme, Shana
Hill, and Alexis Ivy