Zenzele Isoke

Zenzele Isoke is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. She studies black women’s community politics and activisms in urban spaces. She teaches courses in feminist theory and methods, women in politics and public policy, women and popular culture, and feminist geography. Her first book, Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance, will be released by Palgrave-MacMillian Press in 2012. Using intersectionality as a central analytic tool and the stories that contemporary activists tell about politics as her primary evidence, her book examines both the practical and discursive roles that black women activists play in hip hop politics, black LGBTQ politics, and other contemporary social movements in Newark, New Jersey. She is the author of two articles forthcoming in Transforming Anthropology: A Journal of Black Anthropology and Gender, Place, and Culture, and has recently begun a research project called “Unheard Voices at the Bottom of Empire: Afro-Arab women and hip hop culture in Dubai, UAE.”