Joao Gabriel

Postdoctoral Fellow

Joao Gabriel is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. He holds a PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on the history of slavery and abolition in the French Caribbean, with particular attention to the relationship between slavery, labor coercion, and incarceration. His activism is centered on challenging contemporary forms of French colonialism in the Caribbean, especially issues related to borders, migration control, and the exploitation of migrant workers in French overseas territories. In this capacity, he is a member of La Cimade, an organization that advocates against restrictive French migration policies, particularly in Guadeloupe and French Guiana. He is also a member of the Observatoire Terre-Monde, a research center dedicated to promoting an anti-imperialist approach to ecology, grounded in struggles for social justice and in the defense of lands and communities in the Global South against various forms of exploitation.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.