In Conversation

Summary: Romeo Oriogun, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University, joins Dean Michael Horswell in our latest edition of In Conversation. They discuss poetry, migration, and the role of African literature in global literary discourse.

Romeo Oriogun is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University and explores themes of migration, queerness, and survival in his poetry and nonfiction.

A Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, Oriogun is the author of Sacrament of Bodies, Nomad, and The Gathering of Bastards. He has received the Nigeria Prize for Literature, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize, the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

Dr. Michael Horswell engages in conversation with Dr. Annette LaRocco, an associate professor in FAU’s Department of Political Science. In this upcoming episode, Dr. LaRocco discusses several topics, including conservation politics, how studying abroad helped shape her career, and her new book, The Nature of Politics: State Building and the Conservation Estate in Postcolonial Botswana.
Why do states choose to set aside land for national parks and other protected areas? How do these decisions impact their citizens and structure their economies? How and why do states decide to make governing their environments a political priority? These are questions explored by Annette LaRocco in her book The Nature of Politics: State Building and the Conservation Estate in Postcolonial Botswana. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and years of extensive fieldwork in Botswana, LaRocco argues that the seemingly mundane processes of conserving landscapes and wildlife are, in fact, deeply political acts that are essential to state-building for many countries in the postcolonial Global South. Conservation itself is political and impacts human populations and societies, irrespective of its ecological or biological impacts. In her new book, she explores how conservation is a way that states exert their authority over people, places, and resources and how it structures economic relationships at local, national, and global levels.

Dr. LaRocco, Ph.D., teaches classes in African politics, environmental politics, the politics of global development, and international relations at Florida Atlantic University's Department of Political Science. . Her research interests include the study of political implications of biodiversity conservation and other environmental policies, specifically in regions of the postcolonial Global South. She has conducted fieldwork in southern Africa for over a decade, most recently as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Botswana and Zimbabwe.

Dean Michael Horswell engages in conversation with Marquese McFerguson, Ph.D., as they discuss navigating race, culture, and gender with poetry and spoken word.
Marquese McFerguson is an Assistant Professor of Intercultural Communication, in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, for the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, at Florida Atlantic University.
His work explores the interconnected dynamics of race, culture, gender, and media. His essay, "When Hip Hop Speaks, We Listen" won the John T. Warren Top Paper Award in 2018. Last year he won the Art Bochner Outstanding Doctoral Research Scholar Award from the University of South Florida. He is a master of Slam Poetry and Spoken Word.

Dean Michael Horswell engages In Conversation with Clevis Headley, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy. Dr. Headley specializes in Africana philosophy, critical race theory, epistemology, analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics. He has co-edited three books, George Yancy: A Critical Introduction (2021), Haiti and the Americas (2013), and Shifting the Geography of Reason (2007). He is currently finishing a book manuscript titled Race, Philosophy, and Being: Working Through the Contestability of Race and Philosophy.

Dean Horswell engages in conversation with Professor Mary Cameron, Ph.D., about her 2019 book Three Fruits: Nepali Ayurvedic Doctors on Health, Nature and Social Change.
Mary M. Cameron first encountered an Ayurvedic medical practice in remote, western Nepal in 1978. In Three Fruits, Cameron traces Ayurvedic medical practices from those village healers to the professionally trained doctors in the Kathmandu Valley.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Fruits-Anthropology-Well-Being-Individual/dp/1498594239