African & Black Studies Faculty
Minor Coordinator
Robin L. Turner is an Associate Professor of Political Science, Chair of the Department of Political Science, and Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Butler University in the USA and an honorary research associate of the Society, Work, and Politics Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Dr. Turner served as the founding director of the Social Justice and Diversity Butler University Core Curriculum requirement from 2017 to 2019. She earned a master’s degree and doctorate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley and a masters degree in social science (African politics) from the University of Cape Town (South Africa). Her research, writing, and teaching span multiple fields, including political science, gender studies, African studies, development studies, tourism studies, political ecology, and geography.
Dr. Turner’s research focuses principally on how public policies shape rural political economies, influence identities, and affect people’s behavior in southern Africa. She uses interviews, ethnography, and archival research to examine the interplay between state policies and local practices over time and to look closely at how past and present ways of structuring property and authority shape local political economies and influence constructions of identity. She has published on topics ranging from the politics of tradition; dispossession, property, and nature tourism; and field research to decolonial pedagogy.
Dr. Turner teaches courses that help students better understand the perspectives, experiences, and political strategies of historically marginalized people in Africa, the United States, and elsewhere in the world. Her courses contribute to the political science major and minor, to the core curriculum, and to several interdisciplinary programs She led the the development of a new Global and Historical Studies course centered on the question, "What is Freedom," with grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Her recent course offerings include:
- PO 151 Introduction to Comparative Politics
- PO 350-SAC African Politics
- PO 351-SJD Politics of Gender & Sexuality in Africa
- PO 352 Comparative Political Economy
- PO 354-SJD Environmental Justice
- PO 490 Senior Seminar on Women and Politics across the World
- PO 490 Senior Seminar on Political Economy
- GHS 206-SJD Resistance and Reaction: Resistance and Reaction: Colonialism and Post-Colonialism in Africa
- GHS 210-SJD Freedom and Movement in the Transatlantic World
Faculty
Dr. Fletcher is a historian of race, gender, confinement, and movement in the American South. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Indiana University.
Before attending IU, Charlene led a domestic violence/sexual assault program and a significant reentry initiative in New York City, assisting women and men in their transition from incarceration to society, and served as a lecturer of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. Charlene’s forthcoming book Confined Femininity: Race, Gender, and Incarceration in Kentucky, 1865-1920, explores the experiences of confined African American women in Kentucky from Reconstruction to the Progressive Era, explicitly illuminating the lives of confined Black women by examining places other than carceral locales as arenas of confinement, including mental health institutions and domestic spaces. Her work has been supported by the Kentucky Historical Society, the Filson Historical Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the Coordinating Council of Women Historians.
Charlene’s second book project explores Italian migration and experiences in the Mississippi Delta between the Gilded Age and the mid-twentieth century. It interrogates the Italian padrone system as a form of confinement and relationships between Italians and African Americans because of shared proximity and experience in the rural Jim Crow South. In addition to her research, Dr. Fletcher is an active public scholar and serves as a Community Scholar at the IUPUI Center for Africana Studies and Culture. She also serves on the editorial boards of The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society and the Digital Encyclopedia of Indianapolis. She is an elected member of the Board of Directors of the National Council of Public History (NCPH).
To learn more about Charlene and her work, visit www.charlenejfletcher.com
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology at Butler University. I am a socio-legal scholar exploring how legal, political, and social actors influence global and local institutions and organizations, producing social change or reproducing structural inequalities. Globally, I study how lawyers shape trade regimes between countries, which has contributed to today’s climate crisis. Locally, I analyze the mobilization against and governance of climate change in Brazil’s Amazon, where I was born and raised. My work has appeared in World Development, Sociology of Development, Law & Social Inquiry, University of Illinois Law Review, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, and Cambridge University Press.
After moving from Brazil to the U.S., I earned my LL.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Indiana University Bloomington. In 2022-2023, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. At IU-Bloomington, I remain affiliated with the Center for the Analysis of Social-Ecological Landscapes and the Maurer School of Law’s Stewart Center on the Global Legal Profession. I am currently co-editing a special issue of the Law & Society Review on Law in a Changing Climate. When I am not teaching, I am mostly working on my book project, about which you can learn more in this video.
Fait Muedini is a faculty member in the Department of International Studies at Butler University. He is also a Fellow at the Desmond Tutu Center for Peace, Reconciliation, and Global Justice at the Christian Theological Seminary and Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana.
He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University at Buffalo, SUNY, an M.A. in International Affairs from the American University School of International Service, and a B.A. in Political Science from Wayne State University. His teaching and research interests are centered primarily on issues of human rights, Islam and politics, and the politics of the Middle East and North Africa.
Dr. Muedini is the author of two books: Sponsoring Sufism: How Governments Promote "Mystical Islam" in their Domestic and Foreign Policies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Human Rights and Universal Child Primary Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He has also published peer-reviewed articles in PS: Political Science and Politics, Oxford Handbooks Online, The Muslim World, and The Muslim World Journal of Human Rights, along with other publication outlets.
His public speaking has included talks and presentations at different universities and conferences, as well as the Foreign Policy Association’s Great Decision Series in Indianapolis.
Dr. Muedini has also published opinions in popular press outlets such as Foreign Affairs.
In addition, Dr. Muedini founded and runs the website www.internationalrelations.org.
Corey Reed is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and affiliate faculty member in the Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (RGSS) program at Butler University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Morehouse College, double majoring in English and Philosophy, his Master of Arts degree from the University of Louisville in Comparative Humanities, and his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Memphis. His dissertation was entitled “Black-Male Imagos and Counternarrative Resistance: An Africana Existentialist Framework for Black-Male Analysis.” He specializes in Africana Philosophy and the Critical Philosophy of Race and Racism, with sub-interests in Existentialism, Phenomenology, Feminism/Male Theory, 20th Century French Continental Philosophy, and Aesthetics.
More information can be found at https://www.coreynreed.com/
Dr. Teigha VanHester (she/they) is a disruptive intellectual and unapologetic scholar who received her PhD in English Studies and a Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Graduate Certificate at Illinois State University. She has lived in over 10 countries and currently serves as an assistant professor of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN. As a native of South Central Los Angeles, California, speaker of Mandarin Chinese and diasporic woman; she writes to have her community of nuanced individuals seen. Teigha has presented at NWSA, CCCC, the Watson Conference, Computers and Writing, Community Writing, and Cultural Rhetorics. She has received the Scholars for the Dream award from 4Cs, is a Forum Editorial Fellow, and a Writing Residency and Emerging Scholar Award from Coalition for Community Writing.
Teigha utilizes her embodied experiences and code-meshed scholar-activist can be characterized as unbossed and unbothered. By placing into praxis a abolitionist and liberated pedagogy, Dr. V to contribute to the Sustainable Resistance and Afro-Nostalgia in Black Femme Creativity by focusing on Rhetorical Co-optation/Colonization, Unapologetic Blackness, Collective Trauma, and Black Feminist Ecology. Dr. V occupies all of the most marginalized spaces within the academy and constantly strives to make the invisible, visible; looking to critique, connect, and create performances that liberate.
Spring 2024 Office Hours provided
